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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"311d3c171679c81ebdedd22b92351001","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/7a745793-8b54-4a64-8a9d-c683d7d40099/retrieve","id":"881314685"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"84057c94-e133-4cc0-a5c2-51498597e203","pagecount":"53","content":"This Report was produced as part of the CGIAR Excellence in Agronomy (EiA) Initiative's effort to ensure that women and youth are well integrated into to the work of the Initiative's Use Cases and that the EiA Initiative is achieving its gender-and youth-specific impacts: that women and men, youth and non-youth equally participate in and benefit from the agronomic solutions developed, validated, and piloted by Use Cases, and that social innovations that empower women and transform unequal power relations and restrictive social and gender norms are piloted and promoted.This report covers the study area of the Sasakawa Africa Association Nigeria (SAA Nigeria) Use Case in the Northwest (Kano and Kaduna) and North Central (Nasarawa), based on interviews conducted in June and July 2023. The study sites are in Northwest (Kano and Kaduna) and North Central (Nasarawa).• Kano has the lowest number of literate people in the sample and highest number of people in the sample without formal schooling (for male and female study participants) among the three focus states. Almost all the heads of households in the Kano sample are Muslim; while 46 percent and 17 percent are Muslim in Kaduna and Nasarawa, respectively. In most of these communities, especially in Kano and Kaduna, women generally have mobility constraints from going to the farm or market or joining group meetings or community gatherings. Most people in the sample in Kano are in polygamous households, while mostly monogamous households comprise the samples in Kaduna and Nasarawa. Across all states, only a handful of single/widowed/separated heads were part of sample. • Fewer households in the sample are likely poor in Nasarawa and more households in the sample are likely poor in Kano and Kaduna. There are more households who indicated they experience food insecurity in Kaduna and fewer households in Nasarawa, compared with Kano. • In terms of household structure, larger household sizes exist in Kano, while smaller household sizes and fewer younger children and youth in households in Nasarawa. Only 56 percent of households have youth members in Nasarawa compared to 85 percent and 94 percent in Kano and Kaduna, respectively. Land area cultivated is the smallest in Nasarawa, compared with Kaduna and Kano. • Almost all households in the sample in Kaduna and Kano planted maize and rice; most sample households in Nasawara planted rice and maize, but more households planted cassava (44 percent of households in Nasawara compared to 5 percent in Kaduna and 22 percent in Kano).• Women and youth participate to a significant extent in agricultural production, but men (especially older men) are more often considered as the main contributor to farm work and the main decision maker on the main plot.• In 65 percent of households, female household members actively participate in farming (according to the household respondent). • In 70 percent of households, youth members actively participate in farming (according to the household respondent).• However, men are considered the main decision maker on farm work on 92 percent of all plots, and non-youth members are considered the main decision maker on 93 percent of all plots (according to the household respondent). • Based on separate responses of female and male respondents, more than 90 percent of women and youth contribute to agricultural activities for the Use Case focal crops (maize, rice, cassava), and the level of involvement of women and youth in farming is not significantly different with that of men or of their older counterparts. This is consistent across the three states. ¾ Reaching women and youth will necessitate making efforts beyond targeting the person who is considered the main decision maker in the household.• There are large differences across states concerning women's and youth's participation in farming. Women participate in farming at a high level in Nasarawa, while youth participation in farming in Kaduna is highest. Women and youth participation in farming is lowest in Kano. There is also low youth participation in Nasarawa but this is because there are few youth members within the households in this sample (only 56 percent of households have youth members in Nasarawa compared to 85 percent and 94 percent in Kano and Kaduna).• 79 percent of households in Kaduna and 92 percent of households in Nasarawa have female household members actively participating in farming, whereas in Kano, the rate is 25 percent. • Youth household members in 82 percent of households in Kaduna actively participate in farming, whereas youth household members in 51 percent of the households in Kano and 53 percent of the households in Nasarawa actively participate in farming. ¾ Gender-and youth-specific activities may need to be considered within each state thereafter depending on the results.Qualitative inquiries could help to further understand why women are less active in farming in Kano and why youth are less active in Kano and Nasarawa.• Literacy levels are quite high among female and male respondents.• The majority of respondents (80 percent of women and 89 percent of men, and 94 percent of youth and 83 percent of non-youth) are reportedly literate. • However, levels of formal schooling are lower than reported literacy rates, with a quarter of female respondents and 15 percent of male respondents not having received formal schooling, and 9 percent of youth and 21 percent of nonyouth respondents not having attended formal schooling. Furthermore, a third of the sample completed only primary or elementary schooling. ¾ The level of complexities in advanced extension materials and ICT tools will have to match with the level of education of the target beneficiaries when designing an effective extension mechanism related to the Use Case technology.• There is a paucity of professional extension services by government, non-government or private sector actors, especially for women. Both male and female respondents indicated they received low levels of government extension services, and this was even much lower among the youth. Social networks, radio and television programs are important for agricultural information sharing.• Only 13 percent of male respondents and 9 percent of female respondents received government extension services.• Private sector, particularly agrodealers, are a main source of agricultural advice for 22 percent of male respondents and 17 of female respondents, however, female youth reported the least access to these support services. • Almost all female and male respondents indicated they received agricultural advice in the past, however, much of this advice was obtained from relatives or other farmers (for 53 percent of male respondent and 67 percent of female respondents), and much less of this agricultural advice is from government or private sector extension service providers. • There are some differences across states regarding access to agricultural advice. In Nasarawa, the access to government extension is much better than in the other two states, with 32 percent of men and 29 percent of women reporting they accessed government extension services. TV programs are the most common main formal source of agricultural information, with 46 percent of men and 22 percent of women reporting that they access agricultural information from TV programs. In Kano, radio programs are the most common source of agricultural information, with 44 percent of women and 53 percent of men reporting that they access agricultural information from radio programs. In Kaduna, access to agricultural information is generally weakest; the main sources are radio programs, with 23 percent of men and 6 percent of women reporting it as their main source of agricultural advice. Twenty-two percent of men and 13 percent of women reported they accessed agricultural information via the private sector (agrodealers). ¾ Radio programs can be expanded and utilized more in Kaduna and Kano; while TV programs can be expanded and utilized more in Nasawara. In all states, agrodealers and traders play a role in agricultural information dissemination; training and access to improved seeds and knowledge among agrodealers and traders can be an important strategy. However, fewer women have access to such information using these sources, and therefore, ways to facilitate women's access to these sources or alternative sources of information that attend to the needs/preferences of women must be explored and considered along with the social networks women often depend on for agricultural information.• Digital technologies (including cell phones, smartphones, or other devices such as tablets or laptops) are not universally used and owned across farm households in the study area, and rarely serve to access agricultural advice.• Access to agricultural advice through digital apps is currently very low (0 percent for both women and men), social media is only used by 1-2 percent of the sample. • Women were less likely than men to report owning and using digital technologies, while youth and non-youth are equally likely to own and use digital technologies. Overall, 62 percent of female respondents versus 77 percent of male respondents reported owning a phone, though most of these are regular cell phones. Only 17 percent of female respondents and 27 percent of male respondents owned a smartphone. Youth are more likely to own and use smartphones whereas non-youth are more likely to own and use cell phones. However, in total, youth and non-youth are equally likely to own and use either a smartphone or a cell phone. ¾ Alternative approaches are needed to bring extension messages originating from digital tools to farmers, an issue pertaining to male and female farmers -though more critically so for the latter. Youth, a more tech-savvy generation, could be at the forefront of spearheading use of digital tools, though they would still need additional support.• A third of the sample participate in groups or associations, but women are less likely to be part of a group than men, especially young women.• Group membership is very low, especially in Kaduna and Kano. A gender gap in group membership exists in Kano, with only 13 percent of female respondents and 35 percent of male respondents being part of a group or association.¾ Reaching women and youth through group-based extension services may require facilitating the creation of new groups for women and youth farmers or devising a more inclusionary strategy for them into existing groups. When working with group leaders, a purposive approach is needed to attenuate the lesser representation of women and youth. Alternative extension methods that do not require groups as such, could also be considered (e.g., male and female lead farmers).• We examined risk aversion, as an indication of willingness to innovation and try out new technologies, by women and men, and value of production per hectare by gendered household types.• Most respondents are willing to accept some risks on their farming: 10 percent reported not willing to take risks; about a quarter would like to take risks; and the large majority is willing to accept some risks. Overall, more respondents in Kaduna are willing to take risks, and more respondents in Kano generally indicated that they do not like to take risks. Among the gender and age groups, male youth in Kano are most likely to be willing to take risks. • Overall, households with women's involvement in farming have higher value of production than those without. Moreover, households with youth involvement in farming also have higher value of production than those without, but the households with youth involvement only (no non-youth participating in farming) have lower value of production. This may be related to the household composition and availability of labor: households where women and youth are involved in farming may spend more family labor on their plots, thus resulting in a higher value of production. • We also found regional differences. When looking at both mean and median, we only see a clear association between women's involvement and value of production in Kaduna; and between youth's involvement and value of production in Kano. Further in-depth analysis is needed to understand what drives these associations. • Youth, given their willingness to take risks, may be a good target group for successful adoption of new agronomic technologies. When targeting non-youth, sufficient information may need to be provided more information on the extent to which the new tools could help mitigate risk and uncertainty in farm outcomes.• We examined inputs to farming decisions, control over use of income, and access to and control over financial resources as key indicators of empowerment.• Across all farming activities tracked, almost all male respondents reported contributing to most decisions, while only a third of female respondents reported contributing to most decisions and two-thirds contributed to some decisions. Most male respondents normally make the farming decisions on their own, while the majority of female respondents normally make the farming decisions jointly with the male decision-maker. About a quarter of women do not normally make decisions on any farming activity. Over half of women in Kano do not make decisions on farming activities, whereas only about 20 percent of women in Kaduna and around 10 percent of women in Nasarawa do not. • Control over use of income is high among both women and men across all states, although gender gap still exists with fewer women having control over income from farming than men, especially in Kano. • Access to and control over financial resources are generally low, especially in Kano and Nasarawa, where only around 43 percent and 36 percent of households are able to take a loan, compared with 75 percent in Kaduna. Gender gap exists in Kano, with only 27 percent of female respondents and 48 percent of male respondents achieving adequacy, i.e. their households have access to credit and the respondent has some input in financial decisions thereabout. ¾ Reaching women and youth may not suffice for them to also make active production decisions that will help them to ensure innovations benefit and ultimately empower them. Special attention to reducing gender-based, intra-household constraints and inequalities to decision-making in Kano will be needed. Finally, farmers struggle to access credit, thus requiring either agronomic recommendations that do not entail major investment or requiring facilitating credit access into the design of the envisioned intervention.• Gender unequal attitudes persist in the study area: men are perceived as the main farmers and primary income earners and women as \"helpers\" on the farm and mainly responsible for domestic chores.• Persistently strong attitudes supporting gender inequality in farming, livelihoods, and household chores exist. For example, eighteen percent of men and 15 percent of women disagreed to the statement \"It is equally important to improve productivity on women's plots as it is on men's plots\". Fifteen percent of men and 10 percent of women disagreed to the statement \"Husbands should help wives with household chores, like cooking and taking care of children\" Overall, across a total of ten statements female respondents disagreed to 1.47 number of statements out of 10 supporting gender equality; while male respondents disagree to 1.91 number of statements supporting gender equality.Interestingly, male youth support gender equality more. ¾ Trying to reach/benefit women and youth hoping they will adopt the Use Case's minimum viable product (MVP) is unlikely to work, unless interventions also target unequal power relations in households and communities. Innovations that empower them or transform unequal power relations and norms need to be a strong focus in this Use Case. Future work by this Use Case and partners are encouraged to include social innovations to shift gender norms and to change attitudes that preserve gender inequality when piloting their agronomic solutions. ¾ Working with youth role models as communicators and agents of change may be a good strategy.This report serves as a youth and gender diagnostic assessment for the SAA Nigeria Use Case in the EiA Initiative. The SAA Nigeria Use Case combines three fertilizer recommendation tools (AKILIMO for cassava, Nutrient Expert (NE) for maize, and RiceAdvice for rice) in one digital interface that can be used on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops. Following the request of the \"demand partner\" SAA Nigeria, the decision support tools (DSTs) for fertilizer will be combined with advice on the planting or sowing windows. For cassava, this is already available as a module in AKILIMO, for maize and rice, this is under development. Modified versions of the RiceAdvice tool, RiceAdvice Lite (RAL) and AKILIMO, were tested in 2021 and 2022 (for AKILIMO, only the growing season 2021/2022). Following this technical validation, the Use Case demanded for an enhanced understanding of the context in which the tool will be used to ensure that it meets farmers' requirements. In particular, the SAA Nigeria Use Case needed an improved understanding on how this tool will be useful for men and women farmers as well as for the younger and the older generations. The results presented in this study report will be instrumental in the scaling and dissemination phases of the Use Case.We align our diagnostic assessment with the Reach-Benefit-Empower-Transform framework of Quisumbing, Meinzen-Dick and Malapit (2021) (Figure 1). This framework highlights the importance of not only reaching target beneficiaries, but also making sure that they benefit from any interventions, that the interventions further increase their empowerment, and lead to a transformation of any restrictive attitudes, norms, and power relations that create gender inequalities. Reaching women and youth with agronomic solutions and associated extension approaches requires including them in project activities (Quisumbing et al., 2023). Benefiting women and youth means the project should also improve their wellbeing, e.g., in terms of income, or mental of physical health (ibid.). However, beyond these steps, it is key to also strive to improve women's and youth's empowerment, i.e., ensuring they have the ability to make strategic life choices and act on them (Kabeer, 1999). Finally, sustained positive outcomes require that at community and societal levels, any harmful gender or youth norms, attitudes and behaviors are transformed towards more equality for all (ibid.). Figure 1. A framework for reaching, benefiting, and empowering women and youth and transforming social relations (source: Nchanji, n.d.) This framework helps to ensure that we appropriately anticipate gender and youth dynamics that may prevent the SAA Nigeria Use Case from reaching, benefiting, and empowering women and youth and transforming unequal power relations and attitudes and norms. The diagnostic tool can then serve to inform the design (or re-design) of the MVP and associated extension approaches to be validated and piloted by the SAA Nigeria Use Case. The remainder of the report is structured as follows. Section 2 describes relevant literature related to gender and youth in the context of the Use Case. Section 3 summarizes the dataset and key indicators explored within the reach-benefit-empowermenttransform framework. Section 4 presents the results. Section 5 offers concluding remarks and recommendations.A recent report published by the World Bank (2022) draws on the Nigeria General Household Survey (2018Survey ( -2019) ) to highlight the gender gaps in labor force participation, document the drivers of the gender gaps in key sectors, highlight certain constraints including land and occupational segregation, and provide policy and programming recommendations to close the gender gaps. Similarly, Oseni et al. (2013), based on the earlier nationally representative General Household Survey Panel 2010-2011, provide insights in gender differences in the agricultural sector in Nigeria. Oseni et al. (2013) show that women, like men, are heavily involved in agriculture in Nigeria, including producing staple crops and cash crops, and participating all along the agricultural value chain. At the national level, 55 percent of working-age women and 69 percent of men work in agriculture (World Bank 2022). Women in the North of Nigeria work far less, and 22 percentage points less than men in the North (46% compared to 68%, respectively). Such disparities between women and men do not exist in the South of Nigeria (ibid.).However, women have smaller and less secure plots of land, less access to physical inputs such as fertilizer and herbicide, less use of labor, and less access to extension services. It is not surprising, then, that female farmers earn and produce much less than male farmers (Oseni et al. 2013;World Bank 2022). Female-managed plots, which average 0.3 hectares in size, are significantly smaller than male-managed plots, which measure 0.6 hectares on average (Oseni et al. 2013). Women are almost half as likely to cultivate cereals and greater than twice as likely to farm roots and tubers, vegetables, and melons (World Bank 2022).Fewer women manage their own plots (World Bank 2022). The majority of female plot managers (63 percent) are widowed, separated, or divorced, while almost all male plot managers (94 percent) were married (World Bank 2022). Nationally, 67 percent of male managers report having the right to sell the plots under their control, as compared to only 31 percent of female managers (Oseni et al. 2013). While women can gain access to use and own land through marriage and inheritance, these options are quite complex and exclusionary given customary law and patrilineal inheritance systems (ibid). Women can purchase land, but intrahousehold dynamics and economic constraints create challenges for them to buy land (ibid).Productivity (the value of output per hectare) on female-managed plots is 30 percent lower than that on male-managed plots at the national level, and 35 percent lower than that on male-managed plots in the North (compared to only 25 percent in the South) (World Bank 2022). Women's lower productivity was explained by their limited use of inputs (e.g., fertilizer and herbicides), engagement in less valuable crop value chains, and use of less productive farm labor (ibid). Male plot managers are also more likely than female plot managers to use inputs, such as fertilizer (42 percent and 19 percent, respectively), herbicide (26 percent and 6 percent), and animal traction (28 percent and 3 percent) (Oseni et al. 2013).Female farmers are also at a disadvantage in terms of access to agricultural labor: female farmers use fewer days of family labor, are less likely to hire outside labor, and, when they do, use fewer days of hired labor on their plots; while male farmers tend to hire outside male labor for assistance in their fields while also using more than three times the amount of male family labor than women (Oseni et al. 2013).With regards to access to agricultural extension, only 3 percent of women plot managers in the North received extension services compared to 20 percent of men (World Bank 2022). This is important given that those plot managers who did participate in extension activities had 18% higher productivity. Women's low participation in agricultural extension activities is due to: 1) current extension services may focus on crops mainly grown by men; 2) cultural norms may create barriers for men extension officers to interact with women farmers; or 3) outreach activities may target mostly male social networks (ibid). Furthermore, Oseni et al. (2015) show that in the North, women produce 28% less than men after controlling for observed factors of production, while there are no significant gender differences in the South. In the decomposition results, the structural effect in the North is larger than the endowment at the mean. Although women in the North have access to less productive resources than men, the results indicate that even if given the same level of inputs, significant differences still emerge. However, for the South, the decomposition results show that the endowment effect is more important than the structural effect. Access to resources explains most of the gender gap in the South and if women are given the same level of inputs as men, the gap will be minimal. World Bank (2022) showed how gender norms contribute to gender inequalities in educational investments made in boys rather than in girls that assume men are breadwinners and women are supposed to stay at home and carryout domestic and caregiving duties. Differences in crop choice by women and men may be due to norms that designate cash crops as \"male crops.\" Gender norms can have an influence on how men extension officers interact with women farmers or other value chain actors. Norms may also prohibit women from registering their land in their names, and instead, registering in the name of male family members. Norms can impact women's ownership of small versus larger livestock, which undercuts women's economic potential. Norms around division of labor and value chain activities can shape women's involvement in less remunerative value chains and activities. Norms may restrict women from using mechanized equipment that could reduce their labor and time burdens, and potentially increase productivity and profitability.Similarly, Das et al. (2023) confirms strong gender norms around women's participation in agricultural value chains in the north. Using data from 11,691 aspiring agribusiness entrepreneurs in Nigeria, they explore factors that drive sectoral choice, gender differences in the choice decision, and especially the role played by norms around gender roles. When given a choice of 11 agricultural value chains in a government program, they find the majority (54 percent) of the applicants chose to enter into the poultry value chain, and women were more likely to choose poultry than men. They find evidence of more restrictive gender norms in Northern Nigeria states, which lowers women's likelihood of entering into agricultural value chains where the potential for profit may be higher. The gender bias in sectoral choice is also attributed to differences in work experience especially in agricultural activities and in the chosen value chain, as well as in land ownership. Women with more experience in maledominated agricultural value chains exhibit lower self-efficacy, which could reflect the challenges they face when deviating from social norms to operate within nontraditional value chains.These studies for the North and South suggest that policy should vary by region, and close attention to gender norms is needed, especially in the North. Moreover, several recommendations emerge to close the gender gap (World Bank 2022):1. Promoting women farmers' choice of higher-value crops 2. Enhancing women farmers' use of farm inputs 3. Facilitating access to farm labor and mechanization 4. Unlocking firm owners' access to growth capital 5. Promoting women's engagement in greater value addition 6. Decreasing occupational segregation 7. Easing women's time constraintsThe data from this survey was collected in June and July 2023 in three different States and nine Local Government Areas (LGAs): Kano (Bunkure, Kura, Tudun Wada), Kaduna (Ikara, Lere, Soba), and Nasarawa (Akwanga, Doma, Obi) (Figure 2A and Figure 2B). The LGAs were selected by i) environmental clustering, ensuring that the dominant environmental clusters that were considered relevant for the Use Case were present, ii) environmental conditions were suitable for at least 2 of the three focal crops (cassava, maize or rice), and iii) security considerations. In each LGA, 10 villages were randomly selected when at least two of the focal crops were assumed to be present as well as women involved in crop cultivation. During the training of enumerators, the lists of the 10 selected villages were confirmed and updated based on the enumerators' knowledge of security and accessibility status of the villages (the rains had already started). In each village, a household list was composed via an interview with the village head and included information on cropping of the three focal crops and the involvement of female household members in crop production. From these lists, 24 households were randomly selected and divided into two lists of 12 households each. The second list served as back-up in case households of the first list were not available. Although the team initially intended to stratify households according to the involvement of women in crop production, this stratification was not put into practice given that in nearly all households women were involved in crop production. Over 93% of the households had women involved in crop production; only three villages (Jingin, Kafin-Birgi, Labunawa) had no women involved. In total, 1091 different households were interviewed. The team calculated sampling weights to correct for biases originating from the sampling design, and ensuring that the results would be representative of the target households in each of the three States.Source: Authors' compilationSource: Authors' compilationThe questionnaire administered in Nigeria contained three parts:1. a household-level part that could be answered by any knowledgeable household member; 2. an individual-level part to be answered by one male and one female adult household member (usually the husband and wife) individually and privately; and 3. a plot-level part focusing on (a) general roster information, including plot size, plot tenure status, decision makers and workers on all the land used by the household, and (b) agronomic practices on the main plot(s) (the most important or largest plot(s) where maize, rice, or cassava was cultivated in the last cropping season).Information on a maximum of 5 main plots per household was allowed to be collected. We have 1,091 observations for the household-level part (Table 1). In the majority of these households (N=845) two individual interviews were conducted, one with a male and one with a female respondent, whereas in the remaining households only one individual interview took place, usually with a male respondent though in a few cases with a female respondent. In total, 1,078 male respondents and 874 female respondents answered to the individual-level part.). Note: in three households no individual interviews were conducted. In a few cases, two male or two female respondents were interviewed from the same household.We classify youth as those people between the ages of 15 and 29 years, based on Nigeria's 2019 National Youth Policy 1 .Reaching women and youth with agronomic solutions and associated extension approaches requires including them in Use Case activities (Quisumbing et al., 2023). In the context of the SAA Nigeria Use Case, we look at the following aspects (i) participation in agricultural activities, (ii) access to agricultural extension services, and (iii) access to digital technologies. To understand underlying constraints we also assess education and literacy levels, and preferences and demand for using these technologies/solutions. Moreover, we look at participation in agricultural groups, which are often a main mode of information dissemination (Ainembabazi et al., 2017).https://www.prb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Nigeria-National-Youth-Policy-2019-2023.pdfBeyond reaching women and youth, Use Cases should aim to benefit women and youth. Such benefits could arise if the technology has effectively been adopted, or if the use of technology results in higher agricultural productivity, among other positive outcomes. In terms of benefit indicators used in this report, we explore risk behavior, to understand to which extent we may expect gender or generational differences in risk-aversion or risk-taking toward new technologies. We also analyze productivity levels by sex and age group of the plot contributors.Beyond reaching and benefiting women and youth, Use Cases can aim to help women and youth strengthen their agency or their ability to make life choices and put them into action, for example by participating in major decision-making processes in the household and beyond. We therefore rely on indicators related to inputs to decisions on different farming activities, control over income, and access to and decisions on credit and financial services.Often, changing individual mindsets is not enough and Use Cases must design and employ social innovations to foster transformative change or to change norms and systems on a larger scale. Achieving this change requires addressing structural and institutional barriers perpetuating gender and social biases. In terms of indicators, we measure the extent of attitudes in support of gender inequality by asking respondents to rate various statements that support gender (in)equality in different activities and decision-making levels using a five-point Likert scale. We also look at indicators of gender-based constraints as in market access and mobility.In this section, we first give more background on the socio-demographic characteristics of the sample households and respondents, and general food security status of the sample households. Then, we discuss women and youth's contribution to agriculture in the study site. Finally, we report the results with respect to the Reach-Benefit-Empower-Transform framework. We show results disaggregated by region where relevant, and especially when regional variation is meaningful and sizeable.On average, households in our sample have 9 members (Table 2). The average household size in Kano is the largest with 12 members, and smallest in Nasarawa with 7 members. Most households (97 percent) have both male and female adults, whereas 2 percent consist of male adults only, and 1 percent include female adults only. On average, the household head is 45 years old, and only 5 percent of household heads are youth. Most households (84 percent) include children below five years old, and 86 percent of these households include male or female youth. Nasarawa is different, however, with only 56 percent of households including youth.Given the nature of the study topic, all households in our sample are farm households. On average, a household cultivates 2.7 different parcels, and 2.9 hectares. Households in Nasarawa, however, cultivate fewer parcels (1.9) on a smaller area of land (2.4 hectares) compared to households in Kaduna and Kano. Households in Nasarawa are less likely to be poor (23 percent), as compared to households in Kano (57 percent) or Kaduna (50 percent). Almost all sample households in Kaduna and Kano planted maize and rice; most sample households in Nasawara planted rice and maize, but more households planted cassava (44 percent of households in Nasawara compared to 5 percent in Kaduna and 22 percent in Kano) (Table A3).The demographic characteristics of the study respondents are shown in Table 3 and Annex Table A1, Table A2. A total of 17 percent of the respondents are youth, with more female youth respondents than male youth respondents. Fifty-four percent of men and 67 percent of women are in monogamous relationships, whereas 42 percent of men and 28 percent of women are in polygamous relationships. More male respondents than female respondents have never married (4 percent and 1 percent, respectively), whereas fewer male than female respondents are widowed (0 percent and 3 percent, respectively). Male respondents are more educated than female respondents: 85 percent of the male respondents versus 76 percent of female respondents have received at least primary school education, and 89 percent of the male respondents versus 80 percent of female respondents are literate. Note: In the survey sampling, we asked a primary male and primary female decisionmaker within a household (usually husband and wife).Asterisks indicate significant differences between men and women or youth and non-youth respondents at ***: p < 0.001, **: p < 0.01, *: p < 0.05.Poverty and food insecurity are high among the study households. An estimated 41 percent of households are poor (based on the poverty probability index method; Table 2), whereas households in Nasarawa are relatively better off with 23 percent of households living below the National Poverty Line. Moreover, a large proportion of households experience moderate or severe food insecurity (Table 4). As shown in Figure 3 and Annex Figure A1, most households reported eating only a few kinds of food (77 percent) and being unable to eat healthy and nutritious food (73 percent) during the last 12 months. Households in Kaduna experience the most severe food insecurity as 90 percent of the households reported eating only a few kinds of foods and 85 percent of the households reported eating less than they thought they should. Households in Kano and Nasarawa are better off in terms of food security, but still, 64 percent of households in Kano reported being worried about not having enough food to eat and 58 percent of households in Nasarawa reported eating only a few kinds of foods and having to skip a meal during the last 12 months. Households were classified as \"Food secure\" if none of the 8 responses was \"Yes\". Households were classified as \"Mildly food insecure\" if any response to question 1) to 3) was \"Yes\" but none of the responses to question 4) to 8) was \"Yes\". Households were classified as \"Moderately to severely food insecure\" if any response to question 4) to 8) was \"Yes\". Both men and women work in agriculture in the study sites, though men are involved to a larger extent than women. We present the data collected on all household members by household (Table 5) and by all plots cultivated by each household (Table 6) 2 . Considering all household members, in 64 percent of households both male and female household members are actively involved in crop production, whereas in 35 percent of households only male household members are actively farming (Table 5). It is rare to find households in which only female (and no male) household members are involved in crop farming. Overall, 65 percent of households have female members actively involved in farming and 55 percent of plots have female members actively working on them (Table 5 and 6). Women have decision-making power on the farm in 50 percent of households and in 39 percent of plots. However, men are still considered the main decision-makers to farm work (in 84 percent of households and in 92 percent of plots). Youth members are also actively involved: 70 percent of households and 66 percent of plots have youth members actively involved in farming. Yet, youth are rarely considered the main decision maker if other non-youth household members are also involved in farming. Only 7 percent of plots are managed mainly by youth. Non-youth household members are considered the main decisionmaker in 91 percent of households and on 93 percent of plots. Among the full sample of households, however, we also have 2. Please note that this information is reported by the main respondent in the household (which is often the household head and often male).households without any youth members. If we further limit our sample to households who have at least one youth member, we find that only in 19 percent of these households youth do not participate in farm work but still in 68 percent of households youth do not participate in decision-making about farm work.There are stark difference across states, with substantially lower participation in farming and in decision making by women in Kano.In Kano, 75 percent of households reported only men involved, 94 percent of households reported only male decisionmakers and 97 percent of households reported men as main decisionmakers. In terms of youth participation, when considering all households (also those who have no youth members), the participation of youth in farming is very low in Kano and Nasarawa, in only around half of households. Yet, in Nasarawa this seems mainly due to a lower presence of youth in the sample households. In Kano we still find that in 40 percent of households with youth, no youth member participates in farm activities, and in 88 percent of households with youth, no youth member participates in decision-making regarding farm work. Notes: Based on survey questions asked at plot level: 'Please indicate which household members worked on plot in the last 12 months', 'When decisions are made regarding the agricultural management of plot, who is it that makes the decision?', 'Among those people, who would you say is the main decision-maker on plot?'. Questions pertaining to youth involvement are analyzed both for the full sample, as well as for the sample that includes youth members only (as indicated in brackets). Notes: Based on survey questions asked at plot level: 'Please indicate which household members worked on plot in the last 12 months', 'When decisions are made regarding the agricultural management of plot, who is it that makes the decision?', 'Among those people, who would you say is the main decision-maker on plot?' Questions pertaining to youth involvement are analyzed both for the full sample, as well as for the sample that includes youth members only (as indicated in brackets).Now we transition to understanding the participation in farming the main crops (maize, rice, or cassava) as reported separately by the female and male respondents (Table 7). We found that the self-reported participation of female or youth respondents is higher than Table 5 and 6 indicate, when the main survey respondent / household head was being interviewed. Based on these sex-disaggregated responses, 92 percent of women contribute to agricultural activities for the Use Case focal crops, and the level of involvement of women in farming is not significantly different with that of men. Similar findings hold when considering youth and non-youth. In Kano, female youth respondents have a lower level of involvement in the farming of the focal crops than male youth respondents, whereas in Nasarawa, women have a lower level of involvement in the farming of the focal crops than men, especially within non-youth respondents.  By crop type, women's participation in crop cultivation is lower than men's participation. Again, we find major differences across different regions, with women's participation in cultivating any of these crops being particularly low in Kano (at most 27 percent) and much higher in Kaduna (maximum 93 percent) and Nasarawa (maximum 94 percent). Women's participation is lowest when considering cultivation of sorghum (43 percent), though that is particularly driven by women's low participation in Kano (8 percent). In Kaduna, we find that women less often participate in cassava cultivation (32 percent) as compared to the other crops (between 78 and 93 percent). We summarize here the proportion of respondents receiving agricultural advice from various sources (Figure 4). Almost all male and female respondents (99 percent) report having access to agricultural advice or extension services in the past 12 months. However, much of this advice is obtained from relatives or other farmers (53 percent of male respondent and 67 percent of female respondents indicated this), and much less of this advice is from professional service providers such as government extension services, traders and input dealers, radio or social media (jointly, they reach only 71 percent of male respondent and 44 percent of female respondents). This demonstrates the importance of social network in the surveyed areas, but it also points at a paucity of professional extension services, especially for women.Overall, female youth seem most deprived of professional extension advice, and rely to the largest extent on relatives for advice (68 percent) as compared to any other respondents (Figure 5). As they get older, though, women (female non-youth) do get more advice from government extension services, private extension services or traders. Male non-youth are more likely to receive information from the government, but no other clear difference exists between male youth and non-youth in terms of their access to agricultural advice by source. Note however that the access to agricultural advice through digital apps is currently non-existent (0 percent for both women and men).  There is a stark difference across states (see Annex Figure A2). In Kaduna, access to government extension is very low, with only 3 percent men and 2 percent women reporting it. The main formal sources of agricultural advice for men are radio program (23 percent reporting) and private sector (22 percent reporting). For women, the main sources are private sector (13 percent reporting), and then radio (6 percent reporting).In Kano, the access to government extension is much greater than Kaduna but still few households reported it as the main source of agricultural information, with only 23 percent of men and 9 percent of women reporting. The main source of agricultural information is radio program, with 44 percent of women and 53 percent of men reporting. For women, the second main formal source is private sector (24 percent), and then government extension (9 percent). For men, the second main formal source is private sector (20 percent) and then government extension (23 percent). Very few get advice from government extension.In Nasarawa, the access to government extension is much better than in the other 2 states, with 32 percent of men and 29 percent of women reporting. For men, the main formal source of agricultural information is TV program for men (53 percent reporting), second is government extension (32 percent), private sector (32 percent), and traders (23 percent). For women, government extension, private sector, trader and TV program (with about a quarter of women reporting each of these sources). There is almost no report of radio programs for agricultural advice. There is more usage of social media for receiving information, with 6 percent of men and 2 percent of women reporting in Nasarawa, than in the other two states.When focusing specifically on digital tools, it is important to bear in mind that not all villages yet have access to a mobile phone or internet network. In particular, 2 of the 90 villages in our study, both located in Kano State, do not have consistent access to a mobile phone network (i.e. more than a quarter respondents reported no access). Two other villages, one in Kano and one in Nasarawa, do not have access to internet, as reported by at least a quarter respondents in each village. Women are less likely than men to report owning and using digital technologies (Figure 6). Overall, 61 percent of female respondents versus 78 percent of male respondents own a phone -mainly a cell phone (resp. 53 and 62 percent) and less so a smart phone (resp. 17 and 27 percent). Usage rates are higher (67 percent for women and 84 percent for men), but still not universal. The difference between digital technology ownership and usage is significant for both men and women. In total, 77 percent of men own either a smartphone or a cell phone, whereas 62 percent of women do. In terms of usage, 84 percent of men and 68 percent of women used either a smartphone or a cell phone in the past 12 months. Youth are more likely to own and use smartphones whereas non-youth are more likely to own and use cell phones (Figure 7). Overall, youth and non-youth are not different in terms of digital technology ownership and usage, when 70 percent of youth and 71 percent of non-youth own either a smartphone or a cell phone, and 76 percent of youth and 77 percent of non-youth used one. Smartphone ownership and use are lowest for older women, and cell phone ownership and use are lowest for younger women.  Overall, roughly 40 percent have not or barely received training on agriculture (Figure 8). More respondents in Kaduna and male youth in Nasawara reported not or barely receiving training (Figure 9). While we do not see gender and youth status differences in being prevented from receiving trainings, we see strong gender differences in needing permission to receive training, with more female youth and female non-youth needing permission to receive training than men (Figure 10). Non-youth men are the least likely to be prevented, but if so, this is mainly due to high costs of transportation, lack of time and bad weather conditions. Nonyouth men are also least likely to need permission, only 21 percent of all the non-youth men, but if so, 93 percent of those reports needing permission from spouse. In terms of group membership, around one third of respondents are members of any group or association. Women are less likely to be part of a group than men, especially young women (Figure 11). Non-youth are more likely to be part of a group than youth (32 percent versus 23 percent). Male youth are the most likely to be part of a group, whereas female youth are the least likely. We see similar patterns when focusing on just agriculture-related groups: men are more likely to be part of agricultural groups than women and female youth are the least likely to be part of agricultural groups.As seen previously in Figures 4 and 5, farmer groups are main sources of agricultural advice for only 3-7 percent of female and male respondents.There are differences by state concerning group membership. Group membership is very low, especially in Kaduna and Kano. A gender gap exists in Kano, with only 13 percent of female respondents and 35 percent of male respondents being part of a group or association.Study Report: Sasakawa Africa Association Nigeria Use Case Figure 12 shows the preference for certain farm inputs, tools, or management practices. Almost all respondents like using the inputs, tools or practices tracked (quality seeds, inorganic fertilizer, farmyard manure, kitchen compost, insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, and water pumps). We see quite a bit more respondents reporting dislike on water pump (roughly a quarter of female youth, male youth, and female non-youth reporting dislike) and kitchen compost (5-9 percent of female youth, male youth, and female non-youth reporting dislike). We summarize here indications of risk aversion or risk-taking behavior, an indication of willingness to innovate and try out new practices or technologies, and land productivity. Figure 13 shows the results on risk aversion and risk taking based on female and male respondents' response on the question \"Are you willing to take some risks on your farm?\". Roughly 10 percent reported not willing to take risks, and about a quarter would like to take risks; and the large majority is willing to accept some risks. There is difference by state. Overall, respondents from Kaduna are most willing to take risks and respondents in Kano generally do not like to take risks. Among the gender and age groups, male youth in Kano are most likely to be willing to take risks.Survey question asked: \"Are you willing to take some risks on your farm?\"In terms of land productivity, we calculated the value of production in Nigeria Naira, NGN, per hectare, at the household level (Table 9). Overall, households with women's involvement in farming have higher productivity than those without. Moreover, households with youth involvement in farming also have higher productivity than those without, but the households with youth involvement only (no non-youth participating in farming) have lower productivity. This may be related to the household composition and availability of labor: households where women and youth are involved in farming may spend more family labor on their plots, thus resulting in a higher productivity.We also found regional differences. When looking at both mean and median, we only see clear association between women's involvement and productivity in Kaduna; and between youth's involvement and productivity in Kano. Further in-depth analysis is needed to understand what drives these associations. We summarize here indicators on inputs on decision-making on farming, control over income, and access to and decisions over credit and financial services.We see major gender gaps in making farming decisions and use of income on the Use Case focal crops (Tables 9-10 show two different questions of asking about inputs to farming decisions). Women have a lower degree of decision-making power in all aspects of farming than men. Women make decisions jointly with others whereas men can make decisions on their own. This finding is consistent with Tables 4 and 5, which show that men are considered the main decision-makers in 84 percent of households and 92 percent of plots.In Table 10, we see that most male respondents normally make the farming decisions solely, while the majority of female respondents normally make the farming decisions jointly. Only 9-11 percent of female respondents reported making farming decisions solely; and about a quarter do not make decisions on any farming activities. Similarly, in the use of income from farming, 56 percent of male respondents normally make the sole decision and 42 percent make joint decisions; while only 16 percent of female respondents normally make sole decisions, 64 percent make joint decisions, and 20 percent do not normally make decisions on the use of income. We see significantly less input made into farming decisions and control over income by women in Kano. As seen in Table 11, across all farming activities tracked, almost all male respondents reported contributing to \"most\" decisions, while only a third of female respondents reported contributing \"most\" decisions and two-thirds contributed to \"some\" decisions. About 2-6 percent of female respondents make no contributions on farming decisions. We see even significantly less input into farming decisions and control over income by women in Kano. In terms of access to and decisions on financial services, 60 percent of households can borrow if they want to (no credit constraint), and around 52 percent of households did borrow in the last 12 months (Table 12).Access to and control over financial resources are generally low, especially in Kano and Nasarawa. In Nasawara, both men and women feel that they could not borrow if they wanted to (they reported highest credit constraint than other states). Inn Kano, women reported more credit constraint and lower control over credit than men. A gender gap exists in Kano, with only 27 percent of female respondents and 48 percent of male respondents feeling like they have adequate access to and decisions on financial services (similar to the subdomain in the abbreviated Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index, AWEAI).There is a gender gap in decisions over financial services, with women having less decision-making power compared to men in terms of borrowing (76 percent versus 97 percent), usage of money borrowed (74 percent versus 97 percent), and being less likely to have a financial account (41 percent versus 55 percent). Note: 1 We combined those who answered either \"Yes\" or \"Maybe\"; 2 Abbreviated Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index (AWEAI)indicator is considered adequate when the respondent 1) belongs to a household that used a source of credit in the past year and participated in at least one sole or joint decision about it, or 2) belongs to a household that did not use credit in the past year but could have if wanted to.We explore respondents' attitudes towards gender equality by analyzing the answers to whether they agree or disagree with a series of gender equality statements, shown in Table 13. The statements were in two sets of ten statements: on set was framed in a positive way (supporting gender equality), and another set contained these statements framed in a negative way (supporting gender inequality). Respondents were randomly assigned to only one of these sets of statements. However, for ease of reporting, we will focus here on the responses to statements supporting gender equality, and the answers of those reporting to the inequality statements are adjusted to reflect the analogous answer in the equality framing -thus allowing us to analyze data from all respondents and interpret it consistently according to the equality framing. More details on the gender inequality statements are shown in Annex Table A4.We find persistently strong attitudes supporting gender inequality in farming, livelihoods, and household chores. A total of 31 percent of men and 27 percent of women disagreed with the statement \"It is ok for women to be primarily the ones who cultivate crops\". A total of 59 percent of men and 55 percent of women disagreed with the statement \"It is ok for women to be the primary earners for their families\" A total of 18 percent of men and 15 percent of women disagreed with the statement \"It is equally important to improve productivity on women's plots as it is on men's plots\" . A total of 15 percent of men and 10 percent of women disagreed with the statement \"Husbands should help wives with household chores, like cooking and taking care of children\". Overall, female respondents disagreed with 1.47 number of statements out of 10 supporting gender equality, while male respondents disagreed with 1.91 number of statements supporting gender equality.We find great variation across statements and that a sizeable share of respondents do not agree with some of the statements in favor of gender equality. There are persistent attitudes supporting men as the main farmers and primary income earners (31 percent of men and 27 percent of women, 59 percent of men and 55 percent of women, respectively). Male and female respondents hold different attitudes in most statements, where women are more likely to be in favor of gender equality, especially in aspects like using ICT devices (79 percent of men and 91 percent of women), engaging in marketing activities (83 percent of men and 90 percent of women), and responsibility of household chores (72 percent of men and 81 percent of women). However, they share the same attitudes in support of men's role as main farmers and primary income earners for the household. Note: Disagree includes both respondents who indicate disagree or strongly disagree. The table does not show respondents, who are a few, who answered \"Neutral\" for each statement. Asterisks indicate significant differences between male and female respondents at ***: p < 0.001, **: p < 0.01, *: p < 0.05.There are significant differences across states in terms of attitudes, with one state showing more gender unequal attitudes in some statements while another state showing more gender unequal attitudes on other statements (Table 14). Women and men in Kaduna are more likely to support women to interact with male extension agents, receive trainings, engage in marketing activities, and being owners and managers of non-farm businesses. In summary, people in Kaduna are more open with women interacting with people outside the household. In contrast, respondents in Kano, especially men, are least likely to support the abovementioned activities for women. Respondents in Kano are more likely to support women to be the primary farmers, income earners, and transfer more responsibilities of household chores to men, though the overall rates are still low. Interestingly, we see the responses of male youth supporting gender equality more (they disagreed with fewer statements supporting gender equality) (Tables 15-16).  Note: Gender attitudes supporting inequality means that the respondents answered \"Disagree\" or \"Strongly disagree\". • In at least 65 percent of households, female household members actively participate in farming.• In at least 70 percent of households, youth members actively participate in farming.• Men are considered the main decision-maker to farm work on 92 percent of all plots, and non-youth members are considered the main decision maker on 93 percent of all plots.• More than 90 percent of female and youth respondents contribute to agricultural activities for the Use Case focal crops (maize, rice, cassava), and the level of involvement of women and youth in farming is not significantly different with that of men or of their older counterparts.• • Women are more disadvantaged in their access to schooling as 24 percent of female respondents did not receive any schooling compared to 15 percent of male respondents.• Youth have received more schooling, but still 9 percent of all youth respondents did not receive any schooling. • Only 13 percent of male respondents and 9 percent of female respondents received government extension services.Weakest access in Kaduna.• Private sector, particularly agrodealers, are also a source of agricultural advice by 22 percent of male respondents and 17 of female respondents, however, female youth reported the least access to these channels.• TV programs were more common in Nasawara and radio programs were more common source of information in Kaduna and Kano.• More respondents in Kaduna and male youth in Nasawara reported not or barely receiving training. • 62 percent of female respondents versus 77 percent of male respondents own a phone. Ownership of smartphones is relatively low 17 percent of female respondents and 27 percent of male respondents.• Over half respondents who used such devices have never used social media: 61 percent of female respondents and 54 percent of male respondents never used social media.• 70 percent of youth respondents versus 71 percent of non-youth respondents own a phone. These are mainly regular cell phones. Ownership of smartphones is low: 29 percent of youth respondents and 21 percent of non-youth respondents.• Over half respondents who used such devices have never used social media: 53 percent of youth respondents and 57 percent of non-youth respondents never used social media.• Technology literacy and reading literacy, for both men and women and for both age groups, present another major obstacle. • Women rarely are the sole decision-maker on input usage and agronomic practices (10 percent of female respondents), but often make decisions on input usage jointly with others in the household (60 percent). Men, however, more often consider themselves as the sole decision maker on input usage and agronomic practices (61 percent).• Differences regarding financial decision-making are relatively small between youth and nonyouth, but are significantly large between men and women (61 percent versus 54 percent).• 41 percent of women versus 55 percent of men have bank accounts.    Women should be encouraged and supported as farmers. Women should not be encouraged and supported as farmers.5It is equally important to improve productivity on women's plots as it is on men's plots.It is more important to improve productivity on men's plots as compared to women's plots.It is ok for women to be primarily the ones who cultivate maize, rice, and/or cassava.Men should primarily be the ones who cultivate maize, rice, and/or cassava.It is ok for women to engage in agricultural marketing activities/trade at the market.Women should not engage in agricultural marketing activities/trade at the market.It is ok for women to be the primary income earners for their families.Men should be the primary income earners for their families. 9Women should be encouraged to be owners and managers of non-farm businesses.Women should not be encouraged to be owners and managers of non-farm businesses.10 Husbands should help wives with household chores, like cooking and taking care of children.Husbands don't need to help wives with household chores, like cooking and taking care of children. Note: Gender attitudes supporting inequality means that the respondents answered \"Disagree\" or \"Strongly disagree\". Note: Graph does not show sources of advice used by less than 5 percent of respondents: traders, television, social media, and agricultural apps. The details and full names about the primary sources of extensions are: 1) Formal sources: government, private sector, traders, farmer association, radio, TV, social media, and agricultural apps, 2) Informal sources: relatives and other farmers, 3) Government: government extension agent, 4) Private sector: private sector extension agent (e.g., input company), 5) Traders: traders, input dealers, etc., 6) Farmer association: farmer association/cooperative, 7) Relatives: relatives, family, 8) Other farmers: other farmers (not already captured), 9) Radio: radio, 10) TV: TV, 11) Social media: Facebook, Viber, WeChat, etc., 12) Agricultural apps: agricultural or weather app, 13) None: Nothing, I did not get information related to agricultural production, marketing, or weather. ","tokenCount":"10246"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"04d84760d799e8c141b1cc85b47299a9","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/537f8d9a-e811-4f28-be37-9f2196734665/retrieve","id":"-887836646"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"738aaf6f-31de-42f3-a727-1269702fa88a","pagecount":"4","content":"response by families of having more children is confirmed and seen as conflicting with other national policy goals.gypt's national cash transfer program, Takaful, and its sister program Karama covered 17 million poor beneficiaries as of 2022, about 16 percent of the Egyptian population. Takaful was designed in 2015 as a conditional cash transfer program providing income support targeted to the most vulnerable, namely poor families with children under age 18. As one of the largest programs -both in absolute terms and in terms of share of the population covered -in the wave of national cash transfer programs spreading across Africa, as well as an innovator among countries in the Middle East, Egypt's experience has the potential to serve as a model for these regions.The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), in collaboration with the Ministry of Social Solidarity, conducted a first-round evaluation of the program in 2017 to estimate its effects on household well-being (Breisinger et al. 2018). That evaluation found large positive impacts on several outcomes, most notably, household consumption. The second-round evaluation, conducted in 2022, found a shift toward greater investment in physical and human capital among program beneficiaries. This brief summarizes the main findings from that second-round evaluation, noting differences from the first evaluation results and providing key recommendations.In 2022, when Takaful had been in effect for five additional years, IFPRI conducted the second-round evaluation. The households in the sample chosen for this second evaluation had applied and been accepted to the program several years earlier, meaning that this sample group had been in the program longer than those in the first-round evaluation. By the time of the second-round evaluation, the average beneficiary household in the sample group had received a monthly payment of 442 Egyptian pounds (approximately US$28) over an average of almost four years. Additionally, at the time of the first-round evaluation, there was no communication or monitoring of conditionalities. In 2019, the program began to spread awareness that eligibility to continue receiving benefits would be conditional on school attendance for school-age children and healthcare clinic visits for younger children and introduced a system for monitoring compliance.The aim of the second-round evaluation was to assess whether a longer duration of treatment together with awareness of these conditionalities led to positive impacts on household well-being. We expected household consumption, asset ownership, and household ability to cope with shocks to improve with the longer duration of transfer receipts and expected children's school enrollment and the nutritional status of younger children to improve due to compliance with the program conditionalities. Additionally, decision-makers expected the program's design would increase women's voice in household decision-making, as women were targeted as the direct beneficiaries of the cash transfers. Both rounds of our evaluation focused on measuring these outcomes and used the same questionnaire design.The impact evaluation was designed using a fuzzy regression discontinuity methodology (see Box 1 for more detailed discussion), which is effective for measuring the impact of programs that use a threshold level for determining eligibility. In this case, beneficiaries are selected based on a proxy means test that comprises several household characteristics and proxies for household consumption; households with proxy means test scores below the threshold of 4,500 were eligible to enroll in Takaful. The regression discontinuity approach compares outcomes for beneficiaries just below the threshold for eligibility with outcomes for nonbeneficiaries just above the threshold, on the assumption that households just above and just below the threshold are highly similar except for the receipt of Takaful transfers.Households can make use of transfers in several ways. They can increase their consumption, save, pay down debts, or invest in productive assets or durables. We find that beneficiary households paid down debts and invested in assets, both of which tend to result in higher income generation and the possibility of greater future consumption.Consumption. We do not detect impacts among beneficiaries on food or nonfood consumption expenditures per adult equivalent unit (AEU, similar to per capita) compared to nonbeneficiaries. This result contrasts with the first-round evaluation, which found a statistically significant increase in the value of monthly consumption per AEU of approximately 8 percent (Breisinger et al. 2018), a relatively large magnitude.Debt. Beneficiary households repaid or avoided taking on debt for store credit or from informal lenders. On average, beneficiary households' debt from these sources was more than 4,000 Egyptian pounds (US$250) less as a result of Takaful.Assets. Additionally, Takaful beneficiaries invested in assets, primarily agricultural machinery and livestock. Small numbers of households invested in major productive assets such as tractors, plows, and drip irrigation networks, while more invested in buffalo and cattle (average increase of 0.08 animals) and goats and sheep (average increase of 0.15 animals).These behaviors indicate that, in terms of poverty alleviation, households may have moved beyond needing to increase consumption, since their minimum needs are being met, and may have transitioned into the next phase, where they are able to build their assets and improve their future income. Additionally, we find suggestive evidence that beneficiary households had more children than nonbeneficiary households in the past five years because of receiving the transfers. These demographic differences may explain part of the null effect on consumption.sChooling. There are very encouraging results for children's schooling. The likelihood that children are enrolled in primary (6 to 12 years old) or preparatory school (13 to 15 years old) increased substantially, by 9 and 21 percentage points, respectively (Figure 1). These results contrast with a lack of impact on school enrollment observed in the first round and point to potential success of the announced conditioning of transfers on school A statistical method called fuzzy regression discontinuity was used to measure program impacts. This approach is recognized as a rigorous causal impact evaluation strategy as it enables controlling for any factor other than program beneficiary status that could explain differences in observed outcomes (Hahn 2001). One disadvantage of this method, however, is that the impacts estimated using the regression discontinuity approach should be interpreted as the average impact of the program specifically for households in the neighborhood of the cut-off. The study surveyed a random sample of 6,475 households in 19 governorates from among households that registered for Takaful with proxymeans-test (PMT) scores nearest to the inclusion threshold. While approximately 45 percent of households below the PMT threshold at the time of registration are receiving transfers, almost 25 percent of households above the threshold are also receiving transfers. This finding is important in interpreting our results because the size of the difference in probability of receiving transfers is relatively small, at around 20 percent. The implication of this for our impact evaluation is that while larger impacts are still discernable, the confidence intervals on our estimates are large enough that there may be small but meaningful impacts that we are not able to statistically distinguish from zero.attendance and the discount on school fees for Takaful households. Increased education is also an investment in households' future -these children can be expected to earn more and may push their families further out of poverty. Enrollment in secondary school was not affected.Women's empoWerment. The first evaluation of Takaful found a decrease in women's decision-making power among women with no formal education (El-Enbaby et al. 2019). We tested whether this pattern still holds and found that it does not. The program continues to show no impact on decision-making among women who have some formal education, but in the second round, beneficiary women with no education are more likely to be able to influence decisions regarding what food can be cooked each day. We do not interpret these results as a large positive shift, but it is encouraging that women's decision-making was not reduced by the program. We also see some evidence of more equal gender norms among beneficiary households, indicated by increased agreement with the statement that a wife has the right to express her opinion if she disagrees with her husband.heAlth. There are no strong results on nutrition outcomes. We also do not find any effects on mental health, including worries, generalized anxiety, or self-esteem.Coping strAtegies. The households in our sample reported large impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on income and commonly reported borrowing money from relatives and reducing food expenditures as the main coping strategies for dealing with shocks. Relative to non-beneficiaries, Takaful beneficiaries were more likely to sell gold or jewelry to cope with shocks, an indication that Takaful households have more assets and are better able to protect their consumption.Thus, this evaluation has shown that the Takaful program caused several positive shifts in household wellbeing, with substantial investments in physical and human capital. While some aspects of household welfare were not affected by the program, these investments reflect choices that tend to pay off in the future.Continue AnD possibly extenD tAkAful. The program enabled households to avoid resorting to damaging coping strategies during shocks. Considering the increasing frequency of global shocks like COVID-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, social protection programs could be an effective way to protect vulnerable households against large-scale shocks, since the program infrastructure needed to reach people is largely in place.proCeeD With plAns for reCertifiCAtion AnD grAD-uAtion of benefiCiAries Who hAve AChieveD self-suffiCienCy, using a generous cut-off point for self-sufficiency, given that many households have not managed to substantially increase their consumption despite increasing productive assets.improve CommuniCAtion regArDing exClusion restriCtions, progrAm length, AnD reCertifiCAtion so that beneficiaries understand that they will not be excluded from the program for engaging in formal sector work with income below a certain threshold and to ensure that beneficiaries are not surprised by sudden changes in program status or unnecessarily worried about the shortterm continuity of the transfers. ","tokenCount":"1604"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"e2c61952afe070ffd12ca28626da8b45","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/cb5067e3-328d-468a-a531-7f98d279c3ea/retrieve","id":"1747052670"},"keywords":["Crop insurance","basis risk","smartphone technology","remote sensing","outcome evaluation","India"],"sieverID":"c2c0a587-e873-4863-a94e-1f9a4b3632bc","pagecount":"41","content":"Titles in this series aim to disseminate interim climate change, agriculture and food security research and practices and stimulate feedback from the scientific community.Sangeetha Rajeesh is a social sciences researcher with Wageningen University, the Netherlands. She is also an independent knowledge broker with expertise in research uptake, communications and knowledge management across several international development themes. Smallholder farmers in India are struggling to cope with production and price uncertainties, and with increasing weather risks and climate change consequences, their livelihood is further threatened (Swain 2014). It is now five decades since crop insurance is used to mitigate climate risks for agriculture in India, however, farmers are yet to benefit from insurance products with timely economic and livelihood protection (Swain 2014, Gulati, Terway et al. 2018, Tiwari, Chand et al. 2020). Digital technologies and innovative tools are deemed more efficient and reliable for crop insurance, and the government of India through Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) program launched in 2016 encourages methodologies that include information and communication technology (ICT) for better agriculture-protection delivery (Gulati, Terway et al. 2018, Boettiger andSanghvi 2019). Nevertheless, there continues to be poor uptake of crop insurance among smallholder farmers for reasons such as lack of insurance awareness and benefits, basis risk problems (compensation not given to insured farmers despite having suffered crop loss), small landholdings, and poor support from the states among others (Aditya, Khan et al. 2018, Singh andAgrawal 2020).Launched in Kharif 2016, PMFBY is the national crop insurance program extending coverage under localized risks, post-harvest losses, etc., and aims to use technology to estimate yields (see: https://pmfby.gov.in/). Together with the area-based PMFBY program, the restructured Weather Based Crop Insurance Scheme (WBCIS) was introduced. PMFBY replaced yield insurance programs -National Agriculture Insurance Scheme (NAIS) and Modified National Agriculture Insurance Scheme (MNAIS), and focuses on increasing crop insurance penetration across the country by enhancing farmer-awareness about insurance and lowering the premium rates (Gulati, Terway et al. 2018, Tiwari, Chand et al. 2020). All farmers who avail agricultural credit i.e., seasonal crop operations loans from financial institutions or banks are covered automatically, but PMFBY is optional for farmers who do not take out farm loans. Farmers are enroled in the National Crop Insurance Portal of the Ministry of Agriculture and FarmersWelfare, and banks that offer crop loans to farmers are responsible for uploading farmer information in the portal. Common service centres or intermediaries offer these services for non-loanee farmers, or farmers can enrol online for PMFBY on their own as well. Premiums are paid via NEFT only -for Kharif 2% and Rabi 1.5%, while premium for annual horticulture and commercial crops is 5%. Insurance coverage is calculated as equivalent to sum insured per hectare as defined in the government notification or / and on the National Crop Insurance Portal multiplied by sown area for the notified crop.With the mandate to support sustainable agriculture production, PMFBY benefits farmers who suffer losses arising from unforeseen weather events by granting financial compensation to ensure income stability and continuity in farming. The program also encourages farmers to adopt innovative agricultural practices, while ensuring easy flow of credit to protect farmers from production risks for them to continue to invest in crop diversification (Singh and Agrawal 2020). PMFBY is open to both public and private sector insurance participation. Despite all these qualities, PMFBY is not popular among insurance stakeholders, particularly farmers (Gulati, Terway et al. 2018, Tiwari, Chand et al. 2020). PMFBY claim payments are triggered when the average yield of the insured crop in the notified area falls below the threshold or guaranteed yield, but this calculation fails to consider individual farmer losses and insured farmers do not receive compensation resulting in basis risk complications (Aditya, Khan et al. 2018). Also, crop data collection processes at village-level is expensive (increasing costs) and time-consuming, contributing to delays in claim processes and settlements (Gulati, Terway et al. 2018). Additionally, there is poor understanding among farmers on how insurance for crops can benefit them and protect their livelihoods (Aditya, Khan et al. 2018, Gulati, Terway et al. 2018).There is scope for innovative technologies to enhance demand for crop insurance at affordable costs to help reduce the burden of weather-related risks on smallholder farmers (Boettiger andSanghvi 2019, Tiwari, Chand et al. 2020). Modern ICTs are expected to quicken insurance processes, plus provide reliable and transparent data (Gulati, Terway et al. 2018, Tiwari, Chand et al. 2020). ICTs (digital technologies) can also simplify shift from index-based insurance to indemnity insurance, and by reducing basis risk while strengthening understanding around insurance, ICTs can contribute to a demand-driven crop insurance system in India (Kramer andCeballos 2018, Ceballos andKramer 2019).For indemnity insurance, transaction costs are high for smallholder farmers who seek to insure small amounts. There are challenges with asymmetric information i.e., the insurers' inability to distinguish low-vs high-risk farmers, can result in adverse selection (meaning that primarily high-risk farmers enrol increasing cost of insurance), and in monitoring farmers' management practices (meaning that farmers may underinvest in farming resulting in more damage than with insurancea moral hazard). These transaction costs and information asymmetries increase the cost of providing insurance, and often deters insurance companies from providing indemnity insurance at premiums smallholder farmers can afford. While index-based insurance has low transaction costs, there is no concern around information asymmetries because it is dependent on observable external data, such as rainfall data or average yields. This is measured for a few randomly selected plots in a larger area through crop-cutting experiments (CCEs), which acts as a proxy for damage to trigger insurance payments. However, compensations are not based on a farmer's actual yields/losses, but on these calculated proxies and thus the basis risk problem continues.Use of mobile-based technology for smart CCEs and remote-sensing data for farmland identification, coupled with systematic digitizing of land records and linking the data to farmers' bank accounts are encouraged by PMFBY for successful crop insurance penetration across India (Singh and Agrawal 2020). These aspects are expected to speed up loss assessments and settlement of claims for farmers distressed by changing climatic conditions (Gulati, Terway et al. 2018). In this context, PBI aims to develop a new way of delivering affordable and easy-to-understand crop insurance using farmers' smartphone pictures to minimize the costs of loss verification (Ceballos, Kramer et al. 2019).Given the poor penetration of crop insurance and problems with basis risk, PBI research assesses individual crop damage from series of crop pictures uploaded by farmers themselves or by agents (project staff, champion / volunteer farmers) and helps to minimize costs of claims verification. With increasing smartphone ownership among smallholder farmers, the PBI insurance product (see Figure 1) leverages on repeat geo-referenced images as reliable data for crop loss and claims assessments, and is designed to allow farmers to document losses that arise from weather-based calamities, at the same time produce photo evidence of the damaged crop.This reduces discrepancies in information, and keeps the costs of plot-level verification of losses down. PBI research simply combines advantages of both index-based insurance i.e., timely compensation without expensive loss assessments, and indemnity insurance i.e., minimum basis risk with a viable product (Ceballos, Kramer et al. 2019). Initially, IFPRI and its partners focused on providing a proof of concept for the technology by testing feasibility of PBI: for instance, whether the approach reduces basis risk in crop insurance, and whether farmers are able to send in images of sufficiently high quality for claims settlement (Ceballos et al., 2019). Further research laid emphasis on analyzing how improved beyond insurance delivery, such as crop phenology (Hufkens, Melaas et al. 2019) and agricultural advisories (Ceballos, Foster et al. 2018)  A qualitative evaluation approach -outcome harvesting (Wilson-Grau and Britt 2012, Wilson-Grau 2018) was used to evaluate PBI. The framework was adapted to develop a narrative of contributions from PBI research and related engagement activities since the project is on-going, and to track changes in behavior of partner-stakeholders influenced by PBI. This type of outcome evaluation is designed to go beyond immediate project outcome assessments, and supports learning about the achievements. A structured interview protocol tool was used to gain deeper insight into stakeholder knowledge of PBI research, their attitude and preferences toward the product, and changes in behavior that can be attributed to PBI.The six-step framework was operationalized through the following outcome evaluation study design (see Figure 3):1. Design the outcome evaluation harvest;2. Gather evidence from PBI documentation 3. Design the interview protocol for key respondents;4. Assess and interpret interview responses;5. Identify evidence from engagement activities; and 6. Data analysis and synthesis from respondents' perspective. As a first step, the primary intended users of the harvest and how they will use the findings were identified, and then base questions were formed to engage key respondents. behavior, and practices surrounding crop insurance. The harvest design process evolves and adapts as information is revealed, and the steps overlapped and were iterative. The process of this study was rapid; outcomes were both identified and further determined based on interviews with key respondents.Journal articles, blogs, reports, PowerPoint presentations, and various project materials were reviewed. Interviews with PBI staff were undertaken to gain background knowledge of the project, implementation challenges and limitations, and also to understand the nuances of project design when bundled with other agricultural services. The potential and scope for PBI to achieve planned outcomes, expansion activities, sustainability and scaling out approaches were discussed. Reviewing of project documents was followed by identifying and formulating potential outcome statements contained in these secondary sources of information. The identified potential outcomes arise from changes in attitude and behavior towards crop insurance in general that are likely to alter stakeholder relationships i.e., between governments, insurers and farmers. For PBI, the primary potential outcome is the changing conversations around basis risk at the partner-stakeholder level that can be evidenced from project documents.The existing basis risk discourse is about how despite being insured, farmers are not compensated for crop loss incurred and need for deserving insurance claims to be settled. PBI documents were scrutinized to identify how PBI is altering this discourse i.e., ways of thinking and talking, also acting on basis risk among partner-stakeholders.Key respondents were selected by the project and these included partners engaged with the PBI since inception i.e., donors, research institutes, insurance services, financial advisory providers, A detailed interview protocol (see Annex 1) was developed focusing on the objectives of the evaluation and potential outcomes harvested as mentioned above. Questions covered aspects around changes in knowledge, attitude, and practices. Further probing questions were used to gain insight into the subtle nuances on how PBI is implemented in the different states.1 Stakeholder interviews were requested with a representative from Mahalanobis National Crop Forecasting Centre (MNCFC), which is the technical service provider to the Government of India and the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY)national crop insurance program, and the representative of the Odisha state government, but these did not materialize in time for this outcome evaluation.Personalized emails were sent to all key respondents, and mutually convenient dates and time slots were reached for the interviews. All interviews were completed over the phone or using Google Meet and Microsoft Teams applications. Note-taking was done to keep a record of all information for easy analysis, and to synthesize respondents' perceptions. Names and organizations of the respondents are anonymized, and this was communicated to them in advance of the interview. All interviews were conducted between December 2021 and January 2022. views on PBI research, product, and / or engagement activity were cross-checked with the views of other respondents, also with the PBI project team. This process enabled an evidence base for the data interpretation.The common and agreed outcomes were linked to engagement activities such as capacity building workshops, trainings, events, conferences, and on-field demonstrations, to validate attribution if any. In the least, the task was to identify what uptake activities by PBI encouraged a changed way of thinking and acting on crop insurance among the key respondents. Evidence was gathered from PBI stakeholder engagement and evidence uptake progress (SEEP) reports submitted to donors. The periodic reports clock all forms of engagement with PBI partnerstakeholders including high-level meetings, dissemination events, and communication material produced (outputs), and the list of publications (academic and grey literature) written to document PBI work. The projects' implementing partners also document their collaboration with IFPRI and PBI on organization websites as recorded events or blogs.The qualitative interviews were elaborate, and recorded examples as a form of explanation provided by the respondents. These responses were used for further establish clarity of context, and also as an endorsement of their views. Data was analyzed by grouping together similar or same viewpoints across stakeholder categories i.e., partners (insurance service provider, financial service provider, and crop advisory providers), stakeholders (donors and nongovernmental organizations), and research teams comprising IFPRI and non-IFPRI members.Synthesis was done by matching responses from partner-stakeholders and the research team, and with evidence from PBI documents. The descriptive nature of the interviews was a good resource to locate evidence-base, and caution was applied so as not to overstate problems or undermine achievements. Weightage was given to outcomes at the partner-stakeholder level that related directly to events or published work.Outcoming harvesting six-step method is easily adaptable and can be combined with other evaluation methods, and generates verifiable outcomes backed by evidence. Data collection methods are flexible ranging from interviews and surveys, workshops and document review, and they can be face-to-face, by telephone, by e-mail. This flexibility of methods was beneficial given the short duration of this evaluation. However, there are some limitations and challenges to using outcome harvesting, such as skill and time it takes to identify and frame potential outcomes. Also, respondents are limited by their exposure and the method does not help to capture other than intended outcomes via the evaluation. Interviews are highly dependent of the participation and cooperation of the stakeholders, and transparency is an essential ingredient for outcome evaluations. It is possible that some respondents prefer to keep information off the record for several reasons, presenting a challenge for the evaluator. This study faced similar challenges with a few respondents, but most were happy to engage with the outcome evaluation of PBI. This study does not include input from government actors since interviews did not materialize in time for the outcome evaluation exercise.From the analysis and synthesis exercise, three main outcomes were derived after verifying for corresponding evidence in PBI research outputs and documents. A primary outcome harvested was the changing discourse on basis risk at the partner-stakeholder level attributed to PBI research. Secondly, the adoption of PBI's technological features by financial and crop advisory partners to deliver insurance along with agricultural services to farmers. The third outcome is changing attitude and behavior among partner-stakeholders toward PBI as a product.Before PBI, the basis risk discourse at the partner-stakeholder level was around farmers not -DonorThe Insurance and advisories go well together since farmers are concerned about crop health, and insurance gives them coverage against damages.With insurance comes diversity in agriculture, and we are always thinking of how to improve farming practices; smallholder farmers are central to our organization. We found that the PBA way of data gathering, using image-based data effectively, and reaching out to farmers is a practical approach for crop advisories.-Non-government organization Prior to PBI, generic advisories were disseminated using short message services (SMS) and / or via farmer WhatsApp groups. All messages were not always useful to every farmer, and there was lack of interest in the services. PBA made two-way communication possible between advisory providers and farmers, creating provision for the more preferred form of personalized advisory delivery helped build a personal trust-connection with farmers.We have used picture-based technology since 2019 to assess creditworthiness of farmers and calculate credit scores for agri-finance products. Now, our research is on how to improve the metadata for these images with detailed information to help farmers and suit our market needs.-Financial service providerFor both financial and crop advisory partners working with PBI, the association with IFPRI brought creditability and branding. Respondents agreed that the adoption of PBI features in their improvised advisory delivery model enhanced organizational creditability and bridged trust deficits between the farmers and the organizations.Crop health is essential, and to provide specific advice to famers on handling crop damages due to pests, diseases, or otherwise, we use a slightly improvised version of PBI's monitoring technique with a magnifier tool to achieve accurate problem identification for precision advisories.-Crop advisory providerAdjustments to the original model that had farmers capture images of their field and damaged crops over time was altered to allow for 'agents' (either paid volunteers from the village, progressive farmers, or staff of implementing partners) to take repeat images and load them to the portal. Such flexibility made timely capture of repeat images a practical possibility during COVID-related restrictions. Despite mobility challenges during repeated lockdowns between 2020-21, financial and crop advisory services continued. Audio-visual advisories were organized for farmers with access to smartphones, and advisories were audio recorded for farmers using basic handsets. Respondents agreed face-to-face consultations have always been the preferred mode of communication, but farmers were happy to receive one-on-one advice albeit remotely, particularly in local languages, which helped them handle specific crop-related issues in a timely manner.After a few years, we will have a large database of crops and diseases to build an artificial intelligence system. This will empower plant experts and farmers to detect and match the disease on their crop with the database at our end, and with a click of a button receive precise instant advice.-Crop advisory providerRespondents suggest several reasons for the change in attitude and behavior toward insurance, and the acceptance of PBI as a product. PBI reduced basis risk and insured farmers benefited directly. This changed their perception about crop insurance in general, and PBI. Also, over the last two years, PBI has worked smoothly in spite of COVID restrictions, plus combining with crop credit and advisory services was successful.Farmers always had a negative impression about crop insurance -that it is only on paper and they will not be compensated for the actual loss incurred even when they raise a claim. PBI changed that perception because farmers received claims they deserved when applying through PBI.-Non-government organizationWe noticed that there is a gradual positive change in attitude and behavior of farmers towards insurance for their crops; this is because farmers trust the PBI process to be fair and just.-Insurance service provider Initially, PBI was designed as a standalone product, but collaboration with financial and agriculture service providers opened new research opportunities. All respondents agreed PBI reduces basis risk, and bundling insurance with credit products and / or crop advisories is a \"useful combination\" because of several advantages to smallholder farmers. The insured farmers would receive timely and personalized expert advice on pest and disease management on their smartphones, as well as credit products to support their investments in furthering agriculture and in managing loss arising from weather-related risks reducing insurance burden.In the beginning, farmers took-up PBI because the project paid insurance premiums, but now almost 50% are willing to invest in insurance by paying at least part of the premium (in-line with the stipulation under PMFBY) only because they benefitted from PBI with prompt payouts against actual crop damages suffered, particularly without prejudice or local political backlash.-Financial service provider Project reports 5 and publications 6 on PBI reducing basis risk, and bundling of insurance with agriculture credit and advisories conclude it is a win-win for all stakeholders, especially farmers. Respondents observed: improved crop monitoring strengthened the awareness of crop insurance, ensured better quality agriculture advisories, and data was used to customise financial services to meet farmer's needs. Partners and stakeholders recorded positive changes in the attitude and behaviour of farmers towards crop insurance after using the PBI product.Farmers were also receptive to financial and agricultural services provided in combination with insurance. They recognised crop monitoring (using images) for insurance offered protection against weather risks, and PBI was welcomed as a product while widely appreciating financial products and crop advisories as added-value to insurance.Farmers began responding favorably to our staff; they listened to what we said about agricultural credit. We were no longer shunned as they will do with creditors, instead they invited our presence because we also spoke of crop insurance. We see the PBI product as a key opportunity to develop our value proposition, and association with IFPRI brings creditability.-Financial service providerRespondents noted challenges in maintaining the same level of interest in the PBI product since it is typical for farmers to feel differently when they do not receive payouts. It is critical for all smallholder farmers in India to recognise benefits of taking crop insurance and the connection this has with financial stability for agriculture investment decisions. To maximise insurance penetration, more awareness programs around how credit and insurance as essential investments to combat agricultural risks must reach rural populations. Insurance and credit are complementary yet have different purposes, and farmers are not aware of these nuances, particularly the fact that each does not offset the loss arising from the other. This knowledge must be explained in simple forms of communication to be comprehensive for the smallholder farmers.A good example of a challenge is explaining the concept -percentage of loss incurred by the farmer does not meet the requirements of the claim made. We find it very challenging to communicate this aspect to farmers. More investment in awareness programs is priority.-Financial service provider All respondents acknowledged that PBI is a research intervention with limited resources, yet was able to provide proof as a reliable technology from insurance despite COVID-related mobility restrictions. Since responsibility of crop data depended on insured farmers taking pictures of their fields using PBI specifications, cumbersome data collection processes with more people at the field-level was avoided. This meant that PBI was cost effective and more efficient with fewer delays for insurance claim processes since everything can be done online/remotely.This section presents outcomes geographicallythe three states in India where PBI is operational and work with the national government, also covering how PBI performance in India influences the insurance sector in eastern Africa. The following content showcases the outcomes arising from partner-stakeholder interviews matched with project documents in each geographic context. Implementation challenges and key improvements for a way forward are also covered.Taking higher risks in agriculture is a difficult decision for smallholder farmers in Karnal, Kurukshetra, Panipet, and Yamnuanagar districts of Haryana, but PBI has made diversification possible. There are cases in Haryana with insured farmers suffering genuine crop damage, but not filling claims because they lost faith in the insurance system. Farmers believe they will not be compensated even if they are insured. Partners engaged 'progressive' or 'champion' farmers to capture repeat crop images on behalf of farmers to manage the trust deficit surrounding insurance. The project 7 paid premiums and organized faster payouts, and farmers began to trust PBI. Follow-up mechanisms were put in place to establish rapport and build longstanding relationships with farmers for a better understanding of insurance and PBI. Respondents confirm that farmers are now willing to pay the premium for PBI (within PMFBY limits) than other insurance products because they trust the crop loss data obtained under PBI. This outcome is also reflected in the project discussion paper 8 that reveals higher willingness to pay for PBI than index-based coverage with digital technologies playing a crucial role in determining this result, given that PBI reduces basis risk 9 and builds trust in the crop insurance system.Managing non-insured farmers' mistrust of crop insurance, and expectations from insured farmers for quick claim settlements are difficult challenges at the grassroots. They believe paying premiums is a waste of money and crop insurance will not benefit them even if they are insured. Now, covered under PBI and benefitted, farmers are willing to pay the premium.-Crop advisory providerFor the partner-stakeholders, implementation of PBI on the ground came with practical challenges since they had no prior experience working directly with farmers. Periodic engagement with farmers despite COVID-related delays helped them establish rapport. The partner now proposes to scale up the picture-based technology idea to build a photo bank of crop-damage images from different directions with the same GPS coordinates, use image processing software and artificial intelligence to detect and identify pests / diseases, and also group agriculture advisories for farmers based on this data. They attribute this development toPBI's open-source structure of data sharing and cross-learning from other states where PBI is operational.8 https://www.ifpri.org/publication/index-indemnity-insurance-using-digital-technology-demand-picture-based-crop-insurance 9 https://www.ifpri.org/publication/picture-based-crop-insurance-pbi-using-farmers%E2%80%99-smartphone-pictures-reduce-We are committed to working toward a sustainable cropping system, and anything to do with farmer-welfare is priority. In three or four years, our image database will be enough for an artificial intelligence data system for each crop, and for every season.-Crop advisory providerThe bundling of PBI with agriculture credit has worked for Odisha partners and farmers. The impression about crop insurance among farmers is the same as in Haryanathey do not trust that insurance is a worthy investment because farmers are not compensated for the losses they suffer. One project 10 outcome in Odisha (Jajpur district) is that the partner sees PBI as a winwin for all stakeholders and as a key opportunity to develop value proposition for the partner organization. While association with IFPRI brings the partner much creditability, using imagebased data to calculate crop losses and claims is accepted as reliable data by partnerstakeholders engaged with PBI research. Crop insurance processes using the PBI product is thus trusted by both farmers and insurers, and has positively changed the relationship between these stakeholder groups. Farmers altered how they respond to crop insurance in general, and toward PBI by demonstrating willingness for the premiums for PBI. These observations by respondents are evidenced by project documents. 11Farmers trust us because of PBI; they even welcome our field agents to the village to monitor their crops. They know we are here to help them, and this realization has changed their attitude toward us, toward insurance itself, and toward PBI. We are particularly proud that the PBI product can better the lives of landless farmers as well.-Financial service provider 10 https://cega.berkeley.edu/research/understanding-the-barriers-to-agricultural-credit-for-women-farmers/ 11 https://www.ifpri.org/publication/picture-based-insurance-it-sustainable-effects-willingness-pay-adverse-selection-and; https://www.ifpri.org/publication/feasibility-picture-based-insurance-pbi-smartphone-pictures-affordable-crop-insurance-0The partner successfully assesses credit standing of farmers with mage-data when reviewing loan applications. They have used picture-based technology since 2019 to asses credit scores and credit histories of smallholder farmers, and are convinced PBI is the best method to assess crop loss and payouts as data is authentic and verifiable.By providing credit along with insurance, we are placing farmers in a better position to repay loans because we empower investment in agriculture through credit, and insurance secures crops.-Financial service providerPractical challenges for PBI uptake in Odisha are around poor smartphone penetration, internet connectivity issues, and poverty. Additionally, the COVID situation made working directly with the farming community a challenge, but delays were minimized since most of the PBI process is possible without physical contact. However, the complexity of explaining insurance concepts to farmers coupled with the expectation that claim settlements will happen almost instantly are challenging. The project assumes that farmers will gradually pick-up an understanding about the virtue of insurance, but this takes longer than expected since farmers are yet to understand how insurance helps to mitigate climate risks and how it protects their future investments in agriculture. Their understanding can improve only as claims are settled and farmers see tangible results from paying insurance premiums.Crop insurance and agriculture credit awareness programs with simple explanations can help farmers understand how both are essential to each other for crop protection.-Financial service providerAll respondents agree documents required by the insurance service provider for payouts are a perpetual problem since they have data discrepancies and are of poor quality. Partners addressed the issue with simple mechanisms: handwritten entries of farmer ID numbers for clarity, typesetting all essential info for faster enrolments, using an extended time frame for repeat images to make adjustments for non-availability of farmers at the field, etc. Going fully digital will enhance continuity in insurance processes, and scalability becomes possible, respondents observed. As a sustainable way forward for PBI, reaching large numbers of farmers is necessary and can be achieved by embedding PBI in the Farmer Producer Organization (FPO) model.PBI was used for groundnut and paddy crops in Pudukkottai and Thanjavur districts of Tamil Nadu. Detected outcome is that the image data became valuable for advisories on crop health and prevented economic losses for smallholder farmers. Online trainings (plant clinics) worked well during the COVID pandemic after some initial problems with getting farmers to participate. Respondents agreed face-to-face interaction is always preferred, but given that PBI had a technological advantage, crop health advisories albeit from a distance helped farmers tremendously. Initial phase of the project was on CCEs; pest-management advice with a picturebased advisory (PBA) component was added later with the PBI product. Farmers who believed insurance was only on paper and that they will never receive compensation for the damaged crops, changed their outlook about insurance and towards PBI completely because they began to receive claims. Now more farmers want to join the PBI project to benefit from insurance; they are willing to pay the premium amount just to be part of the project although they can join the PMFBY program anytime.-Non-government organizationChallenges included organizing documents from farmers in the absence of a guidance protocol on how to handle documentation collection for payouts. Respondents expressed considerable delay in decision-making on crop loss assessments because experts differed while evaluating claims. Also, initial technical issues with the mobile application working only on high-end handsets and some icons on the portal hidden from the user sometimes. Overall, delays in the timeframe of PBI existed between data collection points and the payout transfers to farmers.These were overcome quickly with IFPRI staff working to match the PBI product with ground realities, and from lessons learned at other locations where PBI was operating.We are working to improve the meta data to make the advisory process completely digital without manual intervention. Once we can streamline advisories, we will gradually replace plant doctors with artificial intelligence, and since our organization is plant agnostic, we will open PBA to all crops. The Seeing is Believing idea is how we move forward.-Crop advisory providerWe found picture-based technology to be a practical tool and are exploring how to improvise PBI features for plant health clinics and campaigns we organize for smallholder farmers in Tamil Nadu.-Non-government organizationSince the Government of India seeks to leverage new technologies to improve coverage of its national crop insurance program (PMFBY), there is opportunity for PBI to effect positive change. All respondents agree that focus should be on policy uptake, which can be achieved by building evidence for PBI as a low-cost, easy-to-use product that can detect and verify crop losses, also claims in a timely manner. Demonstrating PBI to be sustainable and scalable is essential for nationwide reach via PMFBY. By evaluating the outcomes of using smartphone and remote sensing technologies for crop insurance across several states, PBI can provide valuable evidence for PMFBY and represent insurance bundling with credit and crop advisories complement insurance. PBI can also present the case of other countries learning from project outcomes in India. -Donor/Research partnerThe project 15 in Kenya is inspired from PBI work in India. Crop insurance issues are similar, and payouts are dependent on historical production data or yield data for pricing insurance products. Using image-based technology to advice on seed varieties that are resilient to climate risks has encouraged farmers to adopt these varieties and reduce their insurance burden.An important outcome has been that farmers are beginning to trust us and our advice on seed varieties and qualities. We use the image-based model as a crop monitoring tool, and offer financial as well as insurance advice on the data.-Private sector partnerBundling seeds and insurance has an unexpected challenge. Stress tolerant seeds reduce risk for farmers, and therefore they do not think it necessary to buy insurance to protect crops. By adopting the recommended seed qualities, farmers are assured that crop losses are at the minimum and abundance of yield with high quality seeds. With negligible crop loss, marketing crop insurance is challenging. There is however, increasing uptake for stress tolerant seeds, and the private sector partner plans to expand to other crops such as potatoes, wheat, and barley, across other agroecological zones in countries like Uganda, Nigeria, Rwanda and Zambia in the near future.In summary, PBI achieved its objective i.e., to provide an innovative and simple tool to deliver accurate crop insurance for smallholder farmers in India.  -Explain interview procedure (you will ask broad questions and they answer); also, that they are free to clarify a question -Let him/her know that the interview will be recorded (audio and note-taking will be done)only for reference and analyses purposes, and that their input during the interview will be kept confidential (only the type of role and organization will be shared).Clear transitions between questions -It is easier for the interviewee to follow the interview if clear transitions are created between questions.Interviewer attitude -It is important that the interviewer encourages the stakeholder, but still remains as neutral as possible with regard to the replies (i.e., don't agree too strongly). Nonguiding questions -Interviewer should try to be as neutral as possible in questions and not guide answers with own assumption and beliefs about the topic Use of terms -Use phrases such as \"How do you feel about\", and words like \"influence\" rather than \"reduce\" or \"improve\" to coach better responses Use of prompts -Be careful not to guide interviewee with prompts; silence and listening is often the most effective technique. Wait for the right opportunity for prompting Paraphrasing -It is useful to summarize your understanding from the interview after every few questions to clarify that we understand the interviewee. Such paraphrasing can also be used as a bridge to move to another section of the interview, or to branch out into subsequent related topics within the scope of the broad question.Towards the end of the interview: Allow time for the interviewee to seek clarification and / or provide further input that they would like to highlight. Also, keep open a short window of opportunity for the interviewee to get in touch at a later date in case he / she would like to add value to the input already given.Challenges with distant interviews: Ideally, interviews are best taken in person, but given the COVID-19 situation and restrictions on travel also meeting face-to-face difficulties, electronically organized interviews are the next best thing. The interviewees having agreed to be interviewed in this format are also aware of the challenges that follow. There could be interruptions from using devices (PCs, laptops, phones, WIFI), internet bandwidth can slow down connectivity causing delayed communication / understanding, and response or reaction time can differ between the question and the answer. This could have an impact on the audio recordings as well. These fluctuations are to be expected and not interpreted for analysis, but be presented as limitations in the case study.Challenges with note-taking during interviews are also to be considered. The interviewer often cannot write quickly enough to capture everything that is said at the same time and concentrate fully on the interview. A challenge with the note-taking (but also with audio-recording) is that interviewees sometimes tend not to answer the question that was asked directly, but probably explain the answer anecdotally. This is acceptable; however, the interviewee must get him / her to draw an inference from such experiences. It is also possible that the interviewee answers a question that was planned for later instead of the one presented. The interviewer needs to try to follow this up and find out whether the interviewee does not want to answer or just did not understand the question. There are several situations that could arise during the interview that are perhaps not written up in the interview guide. Overall, being prepared to ask each question in different ways helps in such situations.After the interview: To retain most information from the interview, it is very important to immediately check the notes after the interview and add details and then (as a second step) type the notes on the same day.Helpful tips *Make sure you are clear what you are trying to find out (internalize the objectives) *If an interviewee goes off the point be prepared to say 'That's very interesting and I wonder if you can tell me more about...' or, 'I understand... but I wonder if you can tell me more about…' *Use plain and simple language. For example, words like 'evidence' may be meaningless to some stakeholders. So, substitute words like 'information' for 'evidence'. *Open-ended questions are more helpful, and fewer questions are best (you can always ask follow-up questions as long as you are clear on the purpose). *At the beginning of the interview, it is important to establish rapport. Do not be overly wedded to your script.","tokenCount":"6137"}

data/part_5/0102538007.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"2f49b0ea187595b79e627eaf12d0e337","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/b20b2a14-f42a-44e5-a623-11a693044a5d/retrieve","id":"1082110847"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"61e81280-9e74-40e4-a018-20925715156e","pagecount":"2","content":"• Artificial insemination (AI) is the main universal method to disseminate improved genetics in livestock species • AI is a staged technology with various levels of infrastructure, semen technology, technicity and field organization • AI using fresh semen collected in the field and relying on basic infrastructure is a promising technology for wider delivery of improved genetics (selected rams in community-based breeding programs) under low input systems • AI facilitates reach more farmers within the communities and also reach out to new communities in the framework of outscaling breeding programsProblem statement• Improved genetic potential rams is essential to improve flock quality and ultimately returns to producers and communities • Use of the best rams in CBBP through natural mating has a very limited impact to spread out genetic potential • Artificial insemination offers a viable option for a wider, more effective use of superior rams • Low infrastructure, easy to use protocols of artificial insemination have been developed to better suit extensive production systems.SmaRT Ethiopia intervention factsheet 9, May 2017Mourad Rekik, ICARDA, [email protected]","tokenCount":"173"}

data/part_5/0121105877.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"0db828a6ba782353b5cda196584ab973","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/74f2b696-0fff-4ff9-be62-3c497272f614/retrieve","id":"-843843049"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"1a7d9040-3baa-4a7f-836b-aaf04e78ea84","pagecount":"4","content":"Livestock farming is practiced by at least 80% of the rural population and plays a key role in Mali's economy. It contributes about 12% to the country's GDP. Approximately 85% of Malians own small ruminants, especially women. Unfortunately, low productivity and marketing constraints limit the ability of ruminant livestock to provide a secure livelihood. Over 30 million sheep and goats provide livelihoods for nearly 5 million Malians and food for millions of Senegalese, Guinean and Ivorian neighbours. Catalyzing the expansion of small ruminant livestock value chains in Mali will increase livelihoods, food security and nutrition for millions of Malians, especially women and youth.As part of the One CGIAR 2030 research and Innovation Strategy, 'Sustainable Animal Productivity for Livelihoods, Nutrition, and Gender Inclusion' (SAPLING) is among 32 initiatives funded by One CGIAR designed to achieve a world with sustainable and resilient food, land and water systems to deliver more diverse, healthy, safe, sufficient and affordable diets, and to ensure improved livelihoods and greater social equality within planetary and regional environmental boundaries.The SAPLING project in Mali was launched during an inception meeting on 19-20 March 2022 on the ICRISAT Campus in Samanko, Bamako. This event brought together more than 35 participants from the public and private sector representations, including farmers' organizations and government agencies such as the Institut d'Economie Rurale and Laboratoire Central Vétérinaire, amongst others.In Mali, SAPLING aims to extend the small ruminant value chain in alignment with the national livestock sector development policy and the national poverty reduction strategy. The small ruminant value chain is a priority for governments and donors to advance their agenda of poverty and malnutrition reduction, inclusion of vulnerable groups, and adaptation to climate change. This value chain offers important opportunities for partnership actions with different organizations leading to the creation of synergies and the necessary conditions for co-construction and scaling up of innovation packages. The value chain was prioritized during a consultation workshop that brought together several stakeholders in the livestock sector on 10 September 2021.The two-day meeting was chaired by the Director General of the Institut d'Economie Rurale of Mali, Dr Modibo Sylla, who in his opening speech welcomed the initiative and described it as consistent with the national strategies and policies for the development of the livestock sector in Mali.In his welcoming remarks, Dr Abdou Fall, ILRI's regional representative in west Africa, who also leads the SAPLING Mali research initiative, acknowledged the ongoing and increasingly good collaboration between CGIAR and the government of Mali, research institutions, NGOs, financial institutions and farmers' organizations. He then recalled the challenges and expectations of the project.The meeting served as a platform to begin co-designing a theory of change (ToC) for the prioritized value chain: small ruminants. The process involved dividing the 25 participants into three working groups and engaging them in a series of iterative discussions. The groups discussed problems regarding the small ruminant value chain and developed a problem statement, vision, outcomes, innovation packages and assumptions. Furthermore, the groups identified actors and their roles, and conducted a site selection exercise for the Mali's project ToC. The regions of Mopti, Koutiala and Sikasso were selected as potential pilot sites for the project. Interventions could be extended to other regions in the course of implementation. The outputs of these groupworks will guide monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) across the interventions in the small ruminant value chain.The stakeholders identified several major problems in the value chain including low productivity of small ruminants, weak structuring of actors and the market, inadequate and poor-quality equipment and services, inadequate qualified personnel and poor technical capacity, insufficient funding for research, poor valorization of products and by-products, poor access to markets and inputs, and poor vaccine coverage.Therefore, the participants envisioned to have a more efficient, inclusive, equitable small ruminant value chain that sustainably improves the income, food and nutritional needs of women and men by 2030. The identified long-term outcomes towards this vision included: (1) men and women who raise small ruminants have improved their knowledge and adopted the innovations promoted, (2) stakeholders (producers, input suppliers and public and private service providers) in the value chain have strengthened their technical, financial, institutional and managerial capacities, (3) private and public actors have increased their investments in the value chain, and (4) public authorities are using the results of the project to strengthen small ruminant livestock policies. Short-term outcomes and innovation packages to begin to address these aims were also proposed.On site selection, Dr Fall made a presentation on the potential sites and the criteria for site selection. The stakeholders met in their initial working groups to make site proposals. Several agro-pastoral regions were proposed during this exercise, including the Mopti, Koutiala and Sikasso regions These outputs will inform the next step of engagement with the stakeholders in the small ruminant value chain in Mali.For more information on the SAPLING research initiative in Mali, please contact Abdou Fall ([email protected]).The SAPLING initiative is led by ILRI's Isabelle Baltenweck ([email protected]), with deputy lead ICARDA's Rekik Mourad ([email protected]).SAPLING is among 32 initiatives funded by One CGIAR designed to achieve a world with sustainable and resilient food, land and water systems to deliver more diverse, healthy, safe, sufficient and affordable diets, and ensure improved livelihoods and greater social equality, within planetary and regional environmental boundaries. SAPLING aims to enable one million livestock producers (half of them women) of cattle, chickens, small ruminants and pigs to engage in inclusive value chains and achieve sustainable productivity gains of 30-50% by 2024. Vietnam is one of seven focus countries for the initiative including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Nepal, Tanzania and Uganda. In Vietnam, the initiative is coordinated by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) and the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT (ABC).","tokenCount":"948"}

data/part_5/0124312715.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"36794be7fe0faf3abb6915e58afeb3b2","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/67b66a41-177e-42c9-bd33-2d7a76bc8c60/retrieve","id":"544274883"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"e465a7ce-92a7-432c-97f4-fa27279b29f5","pagecount":"16","content":"Iain Wright welcomed the committee on ILRI's behalf.Corrections were noted and the minutes adopted.The update report prepared for the ILRI Board of Trustees had been circulated to the PPMC in late October, as well as summaries related to Livestock and Fish program participation at GCARD2 and the ILRI Board meeting. TR therefore limited his update to: o Planning progress: a recent series of planning meetings for components and value chains has demonstrated good progress in increasing ownership of the various teams of their respective agendas. Work plans and budgets for 2012 have yet to be finalized, however o Funding news: The final 2012 allocation of Window 1/2 funding was recently announced by the Consortium Office. Because of the Livestock and Fish program's success in attracting W2 funds, it will no longer receive any W1 funds in 2012. It was decided, however, that it could receive the full amount of W2 funding of $15.23 million committed by donors in 2012, even though this exceeds the original total CG Fund budget of $10.33 million. The program is allowed to carry over unspent funds to 2013. The program has an additional $7-8 million in W2 funding already committed for 2013 and $4 million for 2014. Detailed accounting of the W2 funding has yet to be provided by the Consortium Office.ERRATUM: It was subsequently learned that the Consortium Office was incorrectly reporting that the Livestock and Fish CRP had not received any W1 funds in 2012, when in fact it did receive a disbursement of $0.707m from W1, which means the W2 amount disbursed totalled a lower amount of $14.52m rather than the $15.23m reported in the bullet above.Points to raise during the first joint session with the Science & Partnership Advisory Committee (SPAC) were discussed. Proposed objectives for the joint meeting included:  Review of the SPAC terms of reference, including the tension between its external review function and its role in guiding the program's design going forward  Agreeing expected level of effort (# of days)  Timing and modalities of interaction with the PPMC, program management team and researchers  Dates and venues for SPAC meetings 1 SPAC v1.docxA critical challenge for the Livestock and Fish program in 2013 will be to define a process for prioritization of its collective research agenda that will replace and rationalize the current system of center-assigned budgets. JPTD described a prioritization exercise for 2013 undertaken by WorldFish and lessons for the program. Comments:o Two critical elements of such a process is (i) formulating the ranking criteria and (ii) identifying candidate activities to rank. The criteria used in the WorldFish process are relevant; identification of candidate activities would need a more transparent process o Prioritization as an internal process would need to be complemented by external review o Also needed are qualitative measures to guide the criteria and the supporting background documentation upon which the decisions are made o The Consortium working group may provide some guidance; it will be important to compare with other CGIAR programs o The process should be maintained for high-level resource allocation. In response to a Consortium Office request, the program drafted and circulated Intermediate Development Outcomes (IDOs) in September. These were formulated to strongly link to the program's Theory of Change. There is considerable variation in how the various CGIAR programs have framed their IDOs and a Consortium Working Group is reviewing them and will be recommending how to harmonize them. So far, we have interpreted 'Intermediate' as the development outcomes we are seeking at scale in each of our geographically-bound value chains, which should facilitate their measurement. The Committee reviewed and endorsed the current version as the basis for engaging with the Consortium's IDO Design Group. Action: TR to request specific review of the IDOs by the SPAC The limited progress achieved in 2012 in developing an M&E framework and better articulated Theory of Change for the Livestock and Fish program was highlighted as an area requiring urgent attention. ILRI is seeking to strengthen its social science capacity to lead the 'learning' dimensions of the program's research agenda, but in the meantime, there doesn't appear to be anyone willing to take lead of this area, while more urgent action is needed. A meeting is being organized between ILRI and WorldFish in mid-January (possibly in Penang) to address the Theory of Change, but is not planning to address the M&E framework as such. It was suggested that additional external help may need to be mobilized to move this forward, plus drawing more on WorldFish and CIAT (Ricardo Labert, with Mark Lundy coming in through CRP2). It was agreed to form a working group internally to define the scope and actions needed under the learning and M&E component. SPAC member Andreas Springer-Heinze might be well-placed to advise.Action: TR to form a working group with the specific task of moving forward the M&E framework and Theory of Change, drawing from ILRI, WorldFish and CIAT and external consultants as needed.WorldFish proposes to replace the Uganda aquaculture value chain by an aquaculture value chain in Bangladesh. Reasons for dropping the Uganda value chain were presented, together with a business case for Bangladesh. WorldFish is also proposing to explore establishing a third aquaculture value chain in sub-Saharan Africa, either in Ghana or Nigeria.WF value chains v1.docxThe Committee agreed with the general principle of considering the re-assignment of the value chain to another country, but asked WorldFish to clarify the selection criteria being used given that this will establish a precedent for future changes. Additional detail on the targeting information will be needed, and WorldFish will need to advise on how to handle the Uganda exit strategy. WorldFish should continue to explore the third aquaculture value chain in Africa if it can ensure an adequate level of resources to support the investment. Action: MaB, JPTD to provide for the next PPMC a proposal for selection criteria to apply to re-assigning value chains, and to provide a more comprehensive business case for Bangladesh.2012 status: According to the 3 rd Quarter financial statements, the program is still largely underspent compared to budget due to ILRI and WorldFish, though there are questions about the reliability of the ILRI figures; CIAT has spent to the adjusted budget figure.Additional uncertainty for the ILRI figures has been created, however, by the need to absorb the CRP1.2 funding that has become available.The rationale for basing the 2013 allocation on the Consortium Office's 2012 harmonization exercise was explained, and the application of the allocation principles presented. The Committee was generally comfortable with the recommendation for the reward scenario (a) and agreed to forward it to their respective Finance offices for approval. A suggestion was made to clarify the share of the increase for ILRI accounted for by the reinstatement of the management budget. It is recognized that each CGIAR program comes with a new set of costs for its management and governance that were not previously incurred by the centers. The 2012 management budget covered the costs of the program management office (salaries, travel, services), PPMC, SPAC and planning meetings for each component and value chain. Other costs that could potentially be covered in the management budget were discussed, including those associated with component leader and value chain coordinator responsibilities. The Committee discussed the principles to apply -with the test to be that only costs for services provided to all centers be included --and agreed to TR's recommendation to include component leader-related costs (20% salary, other?). The Committee noted that clarification is needed on ensuring the role of value chain coordinators is supported appropriately.Defining mgmt budget v4.docx A summary breakdown of the 2013 management budget proposal will be made available to the Committee for comment in the coming weeks. At a later point in the meeting, TR noted that the 2013 management budget is proposing to include 20% of the time of JPTD so that he can contribute directly as part of the program management team. This will help share the burden of work expected in having to lead program-wide initiatives and respond to Consortium Office requests, as well as promote shared leadership. The Committee supports the arrangement, but note that it will be important to clearly distinguish his program versus WorldFish tasks. It may be of interest to explore a similar arrangement with CIAT.Action: TR to request component leaders identify budget needs, and to circulate management budget breakdown.Action: TR to report at the PPMC meetings on how the time arrangement for JPTD is being managed.The general format of the annual report has been circulated, and a template will be circulated by mid-January. The Committee agreed to the proposed schedule by which each center team will prepare a detailed report by component by the 1 st week of February, copied to TR and the component leaders. Component leaders will then be responsible for preparing a component-level synthesis report, and the program management team will prepare the overall synthesis report by the time of the Review and Planning Meeting in mid-April. The Committee also agreed to maintaining a central repository of project proposals and reports.Annual report preparation v2.docxAction: JPTD, TR to review previous annual reports and prepare template by mid-January.The Science & Partnership Advisory Committee (SPAC), headed by the interim chair, Max Rothschild, reported that their inaugural meeting was going well and that a fair amount of information had been received from the leadership team. An inception report with preliminary recommendations was being prepared. It was agreed that the report should be sent to the ILRI DG with copy to the program director.The principle of 1-2 SPAC meetings a year was agreed. The next meeting is tentatively proposed to be held in conjunction with the Review and Planning Meeting in Addis Ababa in April, though questions raised whether there would be sufficient progress by then to justify a second meeting. The draft annual report might help to decide. Meeting in Addis Ababa has the advantage of allowing a visit to the small ruminant value chain there. Holding future meetings in other value chains will continue to be considered.It was agreed to maintain the expected SPAC level of effort at 15 days a year, to be reviewed as more experience is gained.SPAC will provide ongoing overall review of the program, and can respond to requests for specific advice or review if articulated by ILRI or the program management and leadership team. SPAC is expected to interact with program management and staff, and will discuss its recommendations with the PPMC for feedback before submitting its report to the ILRI DG with copy to the program director, to which the PPMC will be expected to respond. It will therefore be important to schedule joint meetings. A clear review and feedback process and timetable will need to be agreed.The expectation is that SPAC will balance its role as an external review function with a role in supporting the ongoing implementation of program activities, particularly those related to each member's specific area of expertise. SPAC should be ambassadors as well as advisors and examiners.For communication to ensure transparency, it was agreed that messages to individual SPAC members should be copied to the full SPAC. Similarly, communication between SPAC and individual program staff or partners is encouraged, with copy to the program director.In the specific case of Imke de Boer and Simon Oosting, it was agreed to try having them fill the single position jointly.Immediate priorities identified for SPAC include reviewing:o Component strategies (logframes) o Monitoring and evaluation framework, as it comes available o Evaluation of the IDOs SPAC would like to receive program and component progress reports and supporting documents together with any specific information requiring review about 2 weeks before its meeting. The program director will also share with SPAC the regular updates made to the ILRI Board of Trustees and the PPMC, as well as the annual report.It was recommended that SPAC and PPMC continue review the SPAC terms of reference as experience is gained.At a later point during the PPMC meeting, it was noted that the ILRI DG will be responsible for reviewing the performance of the SPAC; it was recommended that the program director facilitate the members of SPAC in regularly conducting a self-evaluation as well.The meeting with SPAC was briefly reviewed. It was felt critical that SPAC meets with PPMC and program staff at least twice a year.JPTD presented the recent instructions from the Consortium Office (CO), their alignment with the structure being used in OCS and implications for the nomenclature and templates currently being developed for the program. Components will be renamed Themes, and the templates will be adjusted to reflect the CO/OCS terminology; component leaders will need to adapt their existing logframes accordingly. TR will seek clarification from the CO on the reference to limiting milestones to one per output per year.The urgency was stressed for the component leaders to finalize the 2012 work plans and budget by the end of the year, and the 2013 work plans and budget by end of January. These should include activity-level resource information (staff time, budget).Component updates: Each component leader provided an update of progress; the powerpoints are available at: http://livestock-fish.wikispaces.com/spac1. Points to note:o WorldFish interests will need to be reflected o Clarification will be needed on the interaction between the animal health and value chain development components with respect to assessment and technology delivery activities o Major vaccine proposals are being developed with BMGF on ECF and CBPP; their alignment with Livestock and Fish will need to be documented The purpose, timing, selection of participants, and format for the annual meeting as described in the issue brief were discussed. It was agreed to consider the meeting dates as April 15-18 to allow sufficient time for team planning meetings in addition to plenary activities. Two options are to be considered:o Having the plenary activities concentrated within a 2-day period to optimize the participation of partners, and planning meetings on the other 2 days o Having the plenary activities mixed with planning meetings over 3 or the full 4 days 2013 CRP annual review and planning meeting v2.docx A field visit related to the small ruminant value chain should be considered.A preliminary participant list will be drawn up following the selection criteria to assess the numbers and cost involved. There could be particular interest in encouraging communications specialists from the 4 partner centers to participate and meet as a team. Also consider representatives from the systems CGIAR programs in addition to CRP2 and CRP4. SPAC should be encouraged to participate.The planning committee is proposed as: Stuart, Peter B, Barbara, Evelyn, Jens Peter, Iain.Action: SW to form planning committee, which will immediately develop a preliminary participant list, budget and planning timetable. Program staff to be informed.There may be opportunities to develop strategic partnerships with Wageningen UR (Netherlands) and SLU (Sweden). TR described the areas of interest and potential modalities.The Committee endorsed continued efforts to explore the partnerships.Other potential targets for strategic partnerships were discussed, including: CIRAD, EMBRAPA, and a number of development NGOs. More background information will be The concept and proposed modalities for the Ensminger School event were presented. It offers an opportunity to create visibility for the Livestock and Fish program and to provide a forum for strategic issues.While the Committee sees the value for such an event, the consensus was that caution was needed to ensure it is aligned with the program's interests. The Committee considered supporting the field trip of the speakers and their spouses unacceptable for use of public funds and recommended that other support be found for this.Names were suggested as possible speakers: Peter Edwards, Bill Hill (but possibly too Asiaoriented). Emphasis should be given to speakers who will entertain and challenge conventions.Action: TR to solicit input on organization of the individual sessions, including speaker suggestions.TR led the Committee through a review of its terms of reference to assess their alignment to the way in which the Committee has operated during its first year. Comments are summarized in the following table : Term of Reference (v.6) Has the PPMC been performing this function? The Program Planning & Management Committee (PPMC) oversees the planning, management and implementation of the CRP and ensures that the Program Implementation Agreement for the CRP between ILRI and the Consortium Board is being effectively delivered.The director has taken responsibility for day-today management, in some ways reporting to PPMC to get their input, endorsement and help in implementation. PPMC members consider they are effectively representing their center interests in the PPMC while at the same time protecting the program's interests in their own centers. Towards this end, the PPMC will be responsible for and make recommendations to the ILRI DG with respect to:The various ToRs agreed by the PPMC were formally communicated to the ILRI DG for approval, but other decisions and discussions have not been subsequently. This will be reviewed with the ILRI DG. Agreeing the strategic directions for the YES program, including priorities and strategic linkagesThe PPMC continues to pursue development of environment and animal-source food/nutrition agendas, as well as opportunities for global messaging to promote the program Reviewing and agreeing program outcomes, outputs, milestones, work plans and budgets, including CG fund allocation.Important role, but much still being defined by component leaders. Will be important for connecting across components. Systems not yet in place to allow for budget review Monitoring and evaluating program performance, as well as program processes to support these. These may include outputs, outcomes and impact, as well as program organizational effectiveness and cost efficiency. NO Important role but the team is not yet there. This will become more relevant in the medium term once the component leaders have had a chance to develop their programs and the roles of the value chain coordinators are better defined Drafting and agreeing policies and procedures that govern the implementation and administration of the program YES This was done, for example, for the various ToRs and the proposal alignment principles. The issue brief format being used for this meeting will help document policies under development. Areas that will need attention include research ethics/practice and resource allocation. Assignment of staff to program component leadership and VC coordination roles, as well as developing and agreeing TORs for those roles YES and NO The Committee developed and agreed the ToRs for the leadership assignments. ILRI has largely nominated staff to the positions to date in consultation with and approval by the Committee. PPMC will need to review their performance going forward. The CRP Program Support Coordinator serves as Secretary to the Committee.IS THE PPMC COMPOSITION STILL APPROPRIATE? YES TR noted that the restructuring of the CRP Themes and components, and the new DDG appointments and restructuring in ILRI will likely lead to changes in the ILRI representation within the PPMC. This may create an opportunity for more shared governance that could address the awkward observer status of JPTD.The PPMC will periodically review opportunities to broaden the membership to include representation from non-CGIAR members who emerge as strategic partners of the CRP.The PPMC will meet face-to-face three times a year, with teleconferences organized as needed.A quorum of 5 members is required for meetings and for decisions. STILL SATISFACTORY? YES At least once a year, PPMC meetings will be scheduled to coincide with SPAC meetings to ensure regular close interaction.The meetings may also be scheduled to align with the semi-annual ILRI Board of Trustees meetings to provide inputs to the BoT and offer opportunities for interaction.The PPMC is responsible only for higher-level research coordination; research coordination requires much wider participation of component leaders and value chain coordinators, which is a much larger group and unwieldy as a PPMC. The CRP Director will therefore convene research coordination meetings for developing implementation strategies, supporting resource mobilization efforts, and making day-to-day operational decisions, which will be monitored by the PPMC. No formal research coordination body, however, is foreseen.The role of the value chain coordinators, their responsibilities and authority, and their mode of working together vis-a-vis the component leaders needs urgently to be clarifiedSW presented an update on progress in engaging and implementing activities in the selected value chains. The powerpoint presentation is available.Peter Ballantyne presented an update on communications activities and strategy development. The powerpoint is available on the wiki site and the narrative report is attached.Questions arising from the presentation addressed the status/role of the repository, progress regarding data management, the working out loud concept, the need for a disclaimer on the wiki, and if and where 'communication for development' approaches fit in the program's approach. Brief responses were: The repository uses Dspace and is on a platform hosted by ILRI but shared by several centers and research programs (WorldFish indicated they might also join but this needs to be followed up). On data, ILRI is recruiting someone to take this work forward, including for the Livestock and Fish program; we will explicitly draw on CCAFS principles and guidelines work in this area which is very relevant to us. 'Working out loud' is about interactive, collaborative work in which project staff report or 'narrate' what they do openly (on blogs, wikis for instance) so others can follow. A more engaging 'observable' approach has us creating and storing work in ways and platforms where others can see and comment/modify it, long before it is final -See http://blog.podio.com/2011/08/01/working-out-loud-make-work-open-to-make-it-better . A disclaimer will be added to the wiki pointing out that it contains much draft, unedited and preliminary material. A communication for development approach is envisioned, particularly in and around the value chain development activities; this is likely to be embedded in planned and ongoing partnership/engagement efforts and will take off alongside the larger VCD efforts.  In the subsequent discussion, it was noted that the approach proposed for partner engagement in the value chains overlaps significantly with what is envisioned under the innovation systems research within the value chain component and will also inevitably need to integrate with the capacity development strategy as it evolves.The strategy will be further developed in the first quarter 2013 as SW engages with the coordinators and partners in the value chains.SW reported on the program leadership retreat held in mid-November in Nairobi. The output was the outline for a strategy brief for how the leadership team will implement the program. This involved articulating the purpose and strategic objectives of the program, and identifying its critical success factors. The leadership team are developing strategies for each critical success factor and will actively monitor their implementation. The strategy brief will be circulated before the Annual Review and Planning Meeting.There is no systematic communication and sharing of proposals under development. The Program Support Coordinator will be asked to establish a proposal inventory with short abstracts and key parameters so proposal development can be better coordinated.The application period closed on November 30 th . There are just under 100 applications to be evaluated by TR and SW. Katie Hamilton will continue in the interim.JPTD noted 3 important changes agreed during this PPMC meeting: o Targeting and Environment will now be called to Targeting Sustainable Interventions o Components change to Themes, so component leaders become theme leaders o One of the target aquaculture value chains will be considered for relocation from Uganda to Bangladesh once the supporting analysis is completedIn addition, the Learning subcomponent of the Gender and Learning component is proposed to shift to the Targeting component.The meeting closed at 16:00 on December 14 th .","tokenCount":"3891"}

data/part_5/0137417120.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"aa2736cbd8baa0c6bed60200e22be81e","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/9ef341d7-fb9c-416a-aa90-dff6fec4a924/retrieve","id":"945735471"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"367f1a92-bef9-49a0-bb42-11afccb08767","pagecount":"64","content":"Proyecto de Investigación \"MeJoramiento Sostenible I'Igr.icola y de la Calidad de Vida en la Zona de Laderas en l'Iméricd Centrdl\"(mejor conocido como \"Proyecto Laderas\") ejecutado por el Centra Internacional de I'Igricul tur .. Tropical (CIAT) tiene como obj eti va general generar conocimientos estratégicos para que los productos de investigación agricola, estén vinculados a los requerim~entos de la toma de decisiones en los agroecosistemas de laderas en Nicaragua y Honduras, con énfasis en la seguridad alimentaria y en el mejoramiento de la calidad de vida de los pequeños y m~dianos agricultores.lograr este objetivo el \"Proyecta Laderas\" utiliza una metodología interdisciplinaria integrando estudios de Suelos y Agua. Mapeo de los Recursos Naturales lcon apoyo de Sistemas de Información Geográfica), Investigación Participativa con agricultores. Estudios de los Procesos de Toma de Decisiones a diferentes niveles y acciones para fortalecer procesos y estructuras organizativas.El proyecto se está ejecutando en Nicaragua y Honduras en cuatro Cuencas que representan diferentes condiciones agroecológlcas de la zona de laderas en América Central.La importancia de llevar a cabo una investigación a nivel de Cuenca se de debe a: La Cuenca como unidad agroecológica y ambiental permite entender mejor la interdependencia espacial y temporal de los Recursos Naturales, su Uso Actual y Potencial.L~ Cuenca como espacio de vida permite entender mejor las interdependencias entre los diferentes actores sociales (los usuarios de los recursos disponibles) y sus formas de organización sociocultural, económica y política (mujeres, hombres, familias, grupos vecinales, asociaciones, partidos políticos, municipalidades).Consideramos que una perspectiva que integra estos dos elementos nos facilita interrelacionar en forma dinámica e interactiva estudios y acciones a nivel del hogar-finca (que incluye análisis de género), a nivel de microcuenca y de subcuenca.Mejorar el conocÁmiento y la capacidad de análisis para realizar este tipo de investigaciones es una tarea de mucha importancia. La utilización de los Recursos Naturales que sustentan la existencia humana ha aumentada enormemente con el incremento de la pOblación de la Tierra en los tiempos modernos.El presión lugar a crecimiento demográfico ha ejercida una sobre los recursos naturales, y en muchos la degradación y agotamiento de éstos. considerable Casos ha dado A finales de este siglo, la población mundial superará los 6 mil m~llones. contra los 3 mil de hace veinte años y los casi 4.7 millones de hoy dia.Se estima que en el año 2000, sólo para mantener a la población según el actual nivel de consumo, la producción agricola, forestal y pesquera tendrá que aumentar alrededor de un 50%.En esta tarea colosal habrá que apelar mucho a los recursos básicos renovables (tierra, agud 1 anímales 1 peces, bosques, plantas y pasto).explotación excesiva de los suelos pobres, la deforestación de las cuencas hidrográficas, el embalse de los rios, la tala de los manglares y el agotamiento de los recursos genéticos vegetales y animales, son algunos de los factores que ponen en peligro la productividad de los Recursos Naturales para la alimentación y la agricultura.La destrucción de los recursos básicos naturales implica una reducción de la capacidad productiva alimentaria, especialmente en el mundo en desarrollo, donde la mayor parte de los campesinos pobres viven al margen de la economía principal. Para esoS 800 millones de personas, que son cerca de la quinta parte de la humanidad, el agotamiento de los Recursos Naturales significa un menor suministro de alimentos, fibras y de leña, que los llevará a una situación de pobreza, hambre y desnutrición.Se calcula que la población de los países en desarrollo, en los que existe una mayor degradación de suelos, se duplicará en los próximos 20 a 30 años;por lo que la producción agricola tendrá que aumentar en un 60'l. durante esos años para poder alimentar a esa población; esto tendrá que hacerse por medio de una producción intensiva en las tierras cultivadas, de las que gran parte ya se halla sujeta a la degradación. Se Estima que para el año 2000, habrá que producir 200 millones de hectáreas de tierra nueva.La FAO opina que si se deja avanzar la degradación sin control, esta superficie servirá sólo para compensar la que se ha perdido durante ese mismo tiempo (FAO, 1981). los recursos, sino hacer un uso racional de ellos para lograr una producción sostenida y por ende mejorar las condiciones de vida de la población.Partiremos del concepto de que una Cuenca Hidrográfica es un Sistema Bio16gico, Fisico, Econ6mico y Social.Sin E?mbargo para arribar a E?sta dE?finici6n tuvieron que pasar muchos años, donde la historia de las Cuencas Hidrográficas corri6 entrelazada con la historia dE? la humanidad.Desde que E?l hombrE? detuvo su marcha migratoria y optó por la vida sE?dentaria. la agricultura fUE? su actividad principal, y E?l agua y E?1 SUE?lo, simbolos de vida. \"\"'\"'. proceso productivo la cuenca hidrográfica también genera efectos indeseables como la erosión, la disminución de la productividad agrícola por pérdida de suelos, la afectación de la calidad de la escorrentia por las descargas de poluentes, la alteración del régimen hidrológico, la activación de la dinámica torrencial y hasta la disminución del mismo valor turistico de las montañas que }a rodean.Estos efectos, en general impactan tanto a las laderas de la cuenca como a las poblaciones ubicadas I~aguas abajo'l; la erosión constituye uno de los ejemplos más claros.Al trasladarse los efectos negativos aguas abajo disminuye la productividad benéfica del sistema y Crean daños económicos y ambientales como la sedimentación de obras hidráulicas y carreteras e inundaciones sobre poblaciones ubicadas a la salida de la cuenCa.Este desequilibrio que expresa la crisis del sistema prOductivo de la cuenca, exige la intervención que a partir del ordenamiento de las diversas variables y el manejo de las mismas, oriente y controle El desarrollo de la cuenca en beneficio del conjunto de la sociedad.El hombre y las instituciones con presencia en la I'tane j o Sos ten i b 1 e de,-C\"\"u\"en=c\"\"\"a\",s\",.:-• _-\"Un=a\"-\"l\"n,.,t\",r:..od= \",u,-,c\",c\",\",i.\"ó,,.n PE~UEÑOS y /\"IED 1 ANOS PRODUCTORES (PI'tP J La intervención que ha tenido este sector en el medio ambiente se debe a la marginalidad ecológica y social, la cual se puede comprender al analizar los siguientes factores:Debido al elevado número de habitantes por ~rea se ha aumentado la presión sobre el uso de la tierra, lo que a ocasionado la ampliación de la frontera agricola, deforestación y establecimiento de cultivos en suelos no aptos.la presión continua se originar~n fincas m~s peque~as en donde el uso intensivo acelerara el deterioro de los recursos naturale?s.Es característico en este sector productivo el predominio de fincas pequeñas con sistemas de cultivos limpios que exigen labores culturales periÓdicas con la finalidad de obtener ingresos a corto plazo; por lo que se realiza una intensificación productiva.Propiedad sobre la Tierra .La tenencia de la tierra influye en su manejo, por ejemplo el arriendo de la tierra causa mayor deterioro de los recursos, ya que los dueños no administran la finca sino que solamente están interesados en recibir la retribución económica por alquilar sus tierras y el que alquila no esta interesado en realizar prácticas de manejo y conservación de los recursos porque solo le interesa aproveChar al máximo los recursos a corto plazo.Este factor incide en el uso y manejo de los recursos del agricultor, ya que en muchas zonas el mercadeo de los productos agrícolas se hace a través de agricultor-intermediario y el precio de los productos es bajo por lo que los agricultores obtienen pocas ganancias y esto nO les permite invertir en la protección de sus recursos.agricul tares asentados en las zonas de ladera generalmente presentan un bajo nivel educativo, lo cual influye en el acceso tecnológico.permitido seguir subsistiendo pero ha cambio de la destrucción de Este sector siguiente manera: impacta en los recursos naturales de la La gran empresa tiene como fin principal la transformación de los medios de producción (recursos naturales, mano de obra, capital, etc.) en productos de bienes y servicios, persigue como objetivo la maximización de las ganancias económicas.Las principales actividades que este sector realiza son: la industria y los cultivos de agroexportación basados en el uso de los mejores recursos (suelo, riego, etc), crédito y tecnología.la mayoria de los CaSOs tienen impacto directo en el avance del proceso de degradación y agotamiento de los recursos, a pesar de esto es un sector importante para la economía del pais, condición que ha hecho que gocen de privilegios y consideren los recursos como un medio de explotación, sin valorar el daño de 105 mismo$ y las consecuencias en la sociedad.Algunos de los efectos que este sector ocasiona al medio ambiente son los siguientes: Deforestación de los bosques. 10 que ocasiona erosión de los suelos, contaminación de las aguas, pérdidas o migración de la fauna nativa, sedimentación, desbordamiento de rios e inundación de valles y ciudades.Industrias (pesqueras, metal mecánica, etc) repercuten en la contaminaciÓn de agua y aire por sustancias químicas y minerales, desaparición de la fauna nativa local.bosques, sistemas de producción, pérdida de biodiversidad Y afectación de la salud humana.Hasta el momento, aún cuando existe en nuestro país una ley de protección del medio ambiente la mayoría de los empresarios no han invertido en la protección y prevenciÓn del daño ambiental, además que nadie los hace cumplir.Este sector basa sus ingresos en la como mineria, aserraderos, cultivos explotación de recursos de agroexportación e industrias.Los efectos que ocasionan sobre los recursOs naturales son idénticos a los del sector empresarial pero con mayor intensidad.Este sector influye en residuos orgánicos y químicos, Aperturas de vías la contaminación del agua basuras y prOducción de CO~.por Cuyo efecto es la desestabilización de taludes, sedimentación de rios y quebradas.Ocasiona sedimentación, saJinización de suelos por el agua de riego, muerte o migración de especies vegetales y animales.La DegradaciÓn de una Cuenca Hidrográfica es la pérdida de valor en el tiempo, incluyendo el potencial productivo de tierras yaguas, acompañada de cambios pronunciadOS en el comportamiento hidrológico de un sistema fluvial Que se traduce en una peor calidad, cantidad y regularidad en el tiempo, del caudal hidrico. De estos efectos, uno de los más importantes es la reducc~ón del área agricola aprovechable, en términos de superficie y de fertilidad.también hay una serie de otras consecuencias más especificas; por ejemplo. cuando se modifica la cobertura vegetal y la tierra carece de protección frente al efecto de la lluvia y el viento, se produce una pérdida de suelo, proceso que se conoce con el nombre de Erosi6n.Este proce~o afecta directamente el predio donde se alteró la cubierta vegetal, pero altera también a los sectores y predios ubicados en las áreas más bajas, donde el suelo removido se deposita en los cauces y obstruye el escurrimiento de las aguas, facilitando lo~ desbordamientos y las inundacione~ de tierras ribereñas; asimismo la sedimentación o acumulación de suelo en los cauces reduce también la capacidad de retención de    ::ontiiiHliinón Gi:l iigi,¡i ~ suelo por tÚ -i;:SO ¡¡e :u:tanclas úU11iCáS. erúsi¿n del suele por Predicción de la ocurrencia de evaporaciónExiste una gran cantidad de medidas que se han venido identificando y aplicando con éxito en la práctica del Manejo Integrado de Cuencas Hidrográficas; las que se utilizan según su eficacia para superar las alteraciones que el hombre puede provocar en la cuenca.Las medidas que se pueden tomar para solucionar estos problemas se mencionan brevemente ca continuación: Eros.ión. pérdida de Fert.iJ.idad y Capacidad Agropecuar.ia de los Suelos y Desert.iricac.ión Forestación Mejoramiento de la cubierta vegetal mediante siembra de pastos, arbustos y selección de cultivos El nivel y de tipo de ordenación que se realice en una cuenca hidrográfica dependerá de la gravedad de los problemas que la misma presente, de la urgencia de la tarea y de los recursos con los que se disponga para realizar el trabajo. Las medidas de protección se emplean para mantener la situación existente, en cambio las técnicas de mejora se utilizan para obtener beneficios en la producción de agua y la restauración se aplica a cuencas gravemente deterioradas y suele exigir más trabajo, tiempo y dinero.las cuencas hidrográficas de los países en desarrollo. como el nuest~o necesitan con frecuencia de medidas de restauraclón.Estas tres categorías de trabajo están a veces presentes en una sola cuenca, por lo que es responsabilidad del planificador elaborar las combinaciones corrEctas, de acuerdo a la naturaleza y dimensión de los problemas identificados.Las tecnologías que se utilizan para el manejo de una cuenca se aplican en función del aprovechamiento del recurso hidrico, por considerarse el factor más critico de producción, sin restar importancia a los recursos productivos (suelos, recursos genéticos y factores ambientales).establecimiento de estas prácticas dependen del área critica con uso conflictivos y los intereses de la población.tecnologías que se emplean para este propósito, se pueden clasificar de la siguiente manera, Técnicas agroforestales Técnicas de conservación de suelos yagua Manejo del recurso hídrico {almacenamiento y reservorios} Tecnologías de transformación rural Tecnologías de análisis y planificación (SIG, Modelo de Evaluación de Tierras, (ALES) etc.1 Las técnicas para el manejo del recurso hidrico son medidas que se emplean para el almacenamiento y reservorio de este recurso, entre ellas podemos mencionar las siguientes: Acequias de Absorción, Surcos Tabicados, Riego (Surcos, Goteo, Aspersión, etc), Lagunetas, Cisternas, ni cropresas , Represas y Recarga Subterránea, etc.Las medidas Que se utilizan para la protección de una cuenca hidrográfica se pueden clasificar de dos maneras: nedidas de Uso del Terreno Estas medidas son efectivas en el aumento de la infiltración y la capacidad de retención del agua en el suelo, reducen la erosión del suelo, reducen el peligro aguas abajo.Estas medidas benefician a la finca o sea que producen beneficio en el sitio; aqui se incluyen las medidas de estabilización de una cuenca hidrográfica.Entre estas medidas figuran la labranza en contorno~ establecimiento de terrazas, cultivo en fajas, desaguas empastados~ rotación de cultivos, pasturas, control de cárcavas.  La rehabilitación de cuencas se considera como un proceso para superar el estado de degradación de los recursos naturales.Para ello es necesario propiciar la intervención técnica en el medio biofisico relacionando los factores socioeconómicos, para contribuir al mejoramiento de la calidad de vida del hombre, en base a una mejor condición de los Recursos Naturales.para la rehabilitación de cuenca, requiere del pleno conocimiento de las condiciones criticas que generan los problemas en el uso y manejo d~ los recursos naturales; ya que el entendimiento de la problemática es fundamental para poder identificar y analizar las CaUsas que producen el estado de degradación, comprender los procesos, tipos y niveles de impacta.f 'lanejo SDsteniblE' dE' CUE'nCiiS: Ul]ii.Introducci6nLa rehabilitación de cuencas trata entonces de controlar los efectos impactante para contribuir a mejorar la calidad de los recursos naturales y por ende mejorar las condiciones de producción y productividad que permitan al agricultor lograr un mejor nivel de vida.El uso apropiado de los recursos es el objetivo final de la    .t.e ... Por esta via se busca que los mayores ingresos derivados del mejor uso de los ecosistemas alcancen a toda la población y con la mejor distribución posible, particularmente recociendo la interrelación existente entre las tierras altas de las laderas y las bajas. al igual que los mecanismos para enviar recursos de las áreas más productivas a las más frágiles.Tanto en las decisiones que las afectan, como en la gestión y control de las actividades, a fin de promover la capacidad de autogestión comunitaria y la sostenibilidad socio-institucional de las alternativas adoptadas.A fin de que el nivel de producción que se características de permanencia temporal. En este sentido, el manejo de cuencas puede abordar aspectos importantes de la calidad de vida y, por ende, del desarrollo. Puede hacer un aporte sustantivo en forma directa a aspectos como la alimentación y nutrición, sanidad ambiental, sustentabilidad y productividad de los ecosistemas, criterios de uso de los reCurSOs naturales, estabilidad ecológico ambiental, estética ambiental, participación de la comunidad y de la recreación. calidad, distribución, tenencia, uso actual de los suelos, conflictos, caracteristicas, cualidades, valoración y potencialidades) que posee una cuenca; es decir su aptitud Product~va (producción de madera, leña, producción de pastos, agricultura, etc), Turismo. Serv~cios (agua para producción de energía, agua para el uso poblacional, agua para riego, etc) y Usos Húltiples.Las cuencas hidrográficas pueden diferenciarse de acuerdo a su Vocación, según la oferta sostenible de sus recursos en:Por el comportamiento climático generando importantes cantidades de lluvia y excelentes condiciones para almacenar y retener el agua.La capacidad para producir agua, puede conducir a usos diferentes y múltiples, así se pueden distinguir cuencas cOn vocación hidrica para producción hidroeléctrica, abastecimiento de agua potable, riego O navegación.Por las condiciones ecológicas y potencial de sitio para el desarrollo de bosques y manejo silvicultural. La predominancia de especies puede dar lugar a zonas especiales de las cuencas (partes altas y medias) con importantes cobertura arbóreas de producciÓn y protección. Para prOducción de leña, madera y otros.Por las condiciones agroecológicas, potencial del suelo, pendientes, precipitación o disponibilidad de agua para riego. En este caso es muy importante la calidad del suelo (función d~ características y cualidades).Por ejemplo cuencas hortí~olas, cafetaleras~ cañeras.Por las condiciones agroecológicas, potencial de suelo para pastos y forrajes, pendientes y clima. Por ejemplo. cuencas lecheras.Por las condiciones naturales de valores escénicos, sitios históricos, accesibilidad y ambiente seguro.Por las condiciones naturales de valor biológico (biodiversidad, control ambiental).Definir la vocación de una cuenca es fundamental para los planes de manejo, conservación y aprovechamiento de los recursos.El Aprovechamiento de una Cuenca consiste en utilizar los Recursos Naturales que una cuenca posee, en la producción de recursos, en la transformación de productos, en la @xplotación y extracción de productos.aproveChamiento adecuado de una Cuenca Hidrográfica facilita el Ordenamiento Territorial y Ecológico, en cambio si este aprovechamiento se hace de forma irracional favorecerá la degradación, destrucción o extinción de los recursos existentes en la cuenca.~ , e Una Introducción f1anejo Sostenible de U/¡mc,-\",\"=-s,,-: -== .Estos destruyen la vegetación, disminuyendo la protección de las fuentes de agua.La erosión es el lavado del suelo por la acción del agua. El suelo que se erosiona en las partes altas de la Microcuenca. es arrastrado por el agua de las quebradas y ríos disminuyendo la capacidad de almacenamiento. r--~'--• Zona de Amortiguamiellto.En esta zona se recomieooa aplicar las tecnologías del Proyecto LUPE en las áreas que sean utilizadas para cultivos y ganadería.Las tecnologías que se aptiquen deben ir de acuerdo a la problemática que se presenta.Entre otras se recomienda:No quemar, manejo de rastrojos, siembra a curvas a nivel, distanciamiento y distribución, obras físicas de conservación de suelos y barreras vivas, labranza conservacionista, uso adecuado de abonos orgánicos y químicos, prácticas agmforestales, huertos familiares, fogones mejorados. La zona de recarga se extiende desde el nacimiento del agua hasta el punto más alto de la montaña o cerro.Es el área más importante de la Microcuenca, porque es la responsable de la producción del agua, si en la zona de recarga existe abundante vegetación esto ayudará a mejorar la capacidad de almacenar agua.nan~io Sostenible d~ Cuencas: Una Introducción En algunas microcuencas la zona de amortiguamiento no existe, debido a que la obra toma ha sido construida directamente sobre el ojo de agua, esto en parte mejora la calidad de agua pero disminuye el almacenamiento.• Zona Ribereia.Está se encuentra ubicada dentro de la zona de amortiguamiento, pero solo comprende el área de las orillas de ambos lados de la corriente de agua de la quebrada o río. .. '. J1'••\"\\, ,.... t'\"• ' \", \"., ..,) Ir .'","tokenCount":"3190"}

data/part_5/0148707133.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"8277dc2fcc8147500ba7d069f72f94f0","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/fa93944d-cc3d-4a70-bbc9-d83928d7b75d/retrieve","id":"448685897"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"54e1e378-df1b-4e74-8423-de5ba774ce69","pagecount":"27","content":"The East Africa highland cooking banana (AAA-EA) often referred to as Matooke in Uganda is a major source of food and income for many households in Central, South, South Western and some Eastern parts of the country. The Uganda national banana production was estimated to be 8.9 million tons in 2014, with the East African highland banana producing approximately 8.2 million tons as compared with other staple crops such as cassava (2.9 million tons) and sweet potato (1.8 million tons). Production is mainly by smallholder farmers owning an average of less than 0.5 hectares, with medium-sized farms gaining prominence in the South East. Currently Western Ugandan districts of Isingiro, Mbarara and Bushenyi are the highest producers of cooking bananas contributing more than 1.5 million tons annually. However, farm gate prices are low due, among the other reasons, to the low quality [e.g., small sized and sometimes diseased fingers, poor shape and color] of most of the harvested bananas coupled with poor postharvest handling practices and the mismatch between the markets demanded varieties and those largely grown by the farmers. In addition, the way the bananas are marketed involving farmers selling individually and a long chain of middlemen [5][6][7] between the producer and the final consumer also affects the prices earned by the farmers.This protocol therefore is designed to support farmers to improve (1) the quality of their bananas in the field and (2) the postharvest practices in a bid to facilitate access to better prices and niche markets. The protocol is organized into three sections as below:Section 1: Good Agricultural Practices (GAP) Section 2: Proper Harvest and Handling Practices Section 3: Good Marketing Practices (GMP).A market study conducted in major markets in Uganda identified four banana varieties that are highly demanded in local and export markets. These varieties are: Mbwazirume, Nakitembe, Kibuzi and Musakala. The features that make these varieties popular are: The following agronomic practices will give you quality bananas that can fetch better market prices.It is possible for a diseased plant not to show symptoms yet the suckers may be infected and can still transmit diseases. Through de-suckering [leaving only 3 suckers per plant] the plant population is reduced which helps in getting a bigger bunch.Sigatoka and pests such as banana weevils.Dig trenches in your plantation to improve water infiltration and retention. Conversely a bunch that is harvested when over mature will have big fingers but will RIPEN and ROT quickly.What is the right time to harvest? A Kibuzi bunch grown in Isingiro district, Rugaga Sub County is best harvested between 133 and 150 days from the time it flowers. Then it will stay green for between 10-19 days i.e., if harvested at 133 days, it will stay for 19 days while at 150 days, it will stay for 10 days. A Kibuzi banana grown in Rakai District, Dwaniiro Sub County is best harvested between 133-142 days from the time it flowers. Then it will stay green for between 10-15 days i.e., if harvested at 133 days, it will stay for 15 days while at 142 days, it will stay for 10 days.Gentle harvesting helps in reducing physical damage in form of bruises to the fingers. A quality bunch MUST be free from bruises  Unbruised bananas can target niche markets and fetch better prices.Do not place the harvested bunches on the bare ground to avoid contamination. The bananas can be placed on a tarpaulin or banana leaves or any other material other than the bare ground.Grade the bananas according to variety and physical characteristics like bunch size, color, shape, finger length, finger girth and extent of damage.Grading is also important in preparing bananas for the different markets demanding specific quality, such as supermarkets and the export market.Use clean and perforated packaging materials that offer good conditions for storage and work in a clean environment.Packaging materials MUST protect the bananas from pilferage, dirt, mechanical damage, physiological and pathological deterioration during handling. They should be: Easy to stack  Easily labeled  Attractive  Biodegradable or re-usable  Immobilize the bananas during transit and storage.Packing bananas in polyethylene bags is not a good practice because it results in deterioration and ripening due to heat buildup. It is a good practice to cushion the bananas before transportation  Bananas can be cushioned using locally available materials  Cushioning protects the bananas from damage from sharp edges of the truck.Bananas must be moved as quickly as possible and kept as cool as possible during transportation. Transporting bananas at night when the temperatures are cooler is a good practice  If the bananas are to be distributed to several locations, packages that will be off loaded first should be loaded last.Stacking should be done in such a way that the packages/bunches get locked with each other.This will help immobilize the packages/bunches.The best loading factor must be achieved, that is the maximum load that can be carried economically under satisfactory quality conditionsProtect the bananas from excessive heat during loading and off-loading.Banana is a perishable commodity and should be dispatched to the traders within 24 hours after harvesting. Keep the bananas in a shade while harvesting  In the absence of a shade, cover the bananas using a shade net [if available] or any available material to reduce heat buildup.Do not use tarpaulin to cover the bananas as heat builds up under it.Section 3: Good Marketing PracticesThis will help in identifying and understanding the different markets and their needs.It is VERY important to respond to and satisfy the needs of the market.To achieve this it is recommended you do the following: Benefits exist for both the farmers and buyers such as:An optimal pricequality ratio Quality control Uniformity of products","tokenCount":"945"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"9ce3a80b901dd3dffdeaea9bc7356f31","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://repository.cimmyt.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/59300755-5657-41bb-af20-467b460d76c5/content","id":"-1468421548"},"keywords":["Consensus map","Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS)","QTL mapping","Rust resistance","Segregation distortion","Wheat"],"sieverID":"fefab2ea-160a-4973-846f-8658d0a87947","pagecount":"15","content":"Background: Genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) is a high-throughput genotyping approach that is starting to be used in several crop species, including bread wheat. Anchoring GBS tags on chromosomes is an important step towards utilizing them for wheat genetic improvement. Here we use genetic linkage mapping to construct a consensus map containing 28644 GBS markers.Results: Three RIL populations, PBW343 × Kingbird, PBW343 × Kenya Swara and PBW343 × Muu, which share a common parent, were used to minimize the impact of potential structural genomic variation on consensus-map quality. The consensus map comprised 3757 unique positions, and the average marker distance was 0.88 cM, obtained by calculating the average distance between two adjacent unique positions. Significant variation of segregation distortion was observed across the three populations. The consensus map was validated by comparing positions of known rust resistance genes, and comparing them to wheat reference genome sequences recently published by the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, Rye and Ae. tauschii genomes. Three well-characterized rust resistance genes (Sr58/Lr46/Yr29, Sr2/Yr30/Lr27, and Sr57/Lr34/Yr18) and 15 published QTLs for wheat rusts were validated with high resolution. Fifty-two per cent of GBS tags on the consensus map were successfully aligned through BLAST to the right chromosomes on the wheat reference genome sequence.Various marker systems, ranging from low-density restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs) to high-density single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), have been developed and utilized successfully in wheat for genetic diversity analysis, complex trait dissection, and marker-assisted breeding [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Anchoring molecular markers on chromosomes and constructing a genetic linkage map are pre-requisites for their utilization in breeding [7,8,10,[12][13][14].Advances in next-generation technologies have driven the costs of DNA sequencing down to the point that genotyping based on sequence data is now feasible for high diversity, large genome species. Genotyping methods usually involve restriction enzyme digestion of target genomes to reduce the complexity at a reasonable cost [7,[15][16][17][18][19][20]. Davey et al. [17] grouped approaches that apply genome complexity reduction methods into the following classes: reduced-representation sequencing, restrictionsite-associated DNA sequencing (RAD-seq), low coverage genotyping including multiplexed shotgun genotyping (MSG) and genotyping by sequencing (GBS). All of these methods are more or less similar technically. The Diversity Arrays Technology (DArT), Canberra, Australia (http:// www.diversityarrays.com/), has developed a GBS platform known as DArT-seq, which provides an opportunity to select genome fractions corresponding predominantly to active genes. Restriction enzymes used in this method separate low copy sequences from the repetitive fraction of the genome. These low copy sequences are informative for marker discovery. Representative fragments are then sequenced on Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) platforms [21,22]. Using a combination of restriction enzymes, DArTseq GBS offers affordable genome profiling through generation of high-density SNPs as well as PAV (presence and absence variations) markers [23][24][25][26]. In a standard DArT assay, approximately 200,000 genomic fragments are sequenced 10 times, on average, with approximately 2,000,000 tags per sample. As a significant percentage of samples in each experiment are processed in duplicate (to enable stringent marker selection based on scoring reproducibility), all sequence variants that are not legitimate SNP markers are filtered out. Large numbers of additional metadata produced by the analytical pipeline (DArTsoft; DArT P/L, Australia http://www.diversityarrays.com/ software.html#dartsoft) make further marker selection and sorting easy, and enable users to choose specific groups of markers that are most useful for their applications [24].The GBS platform has been used for genetic characterization of more than 40,000 wheat germplasm accessions held by CIMMYT as part of its Seeds of Discovery (SeeD) initiative. A genetic map of GBS markers would be an important prerequisite for trait-based genetic analysis of this large diversity panel. The validity and usefulness of a genetic map depends on its suitability for mapping genomic regions correctly and precisely. In wheat, the Ug99 group of stem rust fungus Puccinia graminis Pers. f. sp. tritici Eriks. & E. Henn. is described as a major forthcoming threat to global wheat production [9,27]. Mapping and deploying adult plant resistance (APR) genes in popular high yielding but susceptible varieties is needed by wheat breeders. To date, more than 50 APR genes have been identified through QTL analyses [28] and some of them (such as Sr2, Lr46 and Lr34) are well characterized and widely used in breeding. Genetic maps that can identify APR genes would be useful for marker-assisted selection (MAS), map-based cloning and detailed molecular characterization in wheat breeding. In this study, three recombinant inbred line (RIL) populations, PBW343 × Kingbird, PBW343 × Kenya Swara and PBW343 × Muu (designated as PB-KB, PB-KS, and PB-MU respectively), were used to anchor the GBS tags to wheat chromosomes. Therefore, the objectives of our investigation were to construct a consensus map of GBS markers and validate known APR genes/QTL against stem rust, yellow rust and leaf rust through mapping, and by comparing them with wheat reference genome sequences recently published by the International Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, Rye and Ae. tauschii genomes.Marker distribution in the consensus map and three individual maps Three RIL populations were analyzed using GBS tags. In total, 13123, 18612 and 6936 markers were mapped on PB-KB, PB-KS and PB-MU populations, respectively (Table 1, Additional files 1, 2, 3 and 4). Using genotype data of the three populations, a consensus genetic map was constructed by assigning 28644 markers to wheat chromosomes with 3757 unique positions (Table 1). The maximum ratio of unique positions on the consensus map was located on chromosome 4D (24.4%), whereas chromosome 2D harbored the minimum ratio of unique positions (4.3%). Of the 28644 markers of the consensus map, 32.9%, 56.3% and 10.8% were mapped on the A, B and D genomes, respectively (Table 1). On average, the A, B and D genomes covered distances of 1252.6 cM, 1635.2 cM, and 414.7 cM, respectively.Total genetic length of the consensus map was 3302.5 cM (Table 1), and average marker distance was 0.88 cM, reached by calculating the average distance between two adjacent unique positions. The length of 3016 marker intervals, corresponding to 80.3% of total marker intervals by 3757 unique positions, ranged from 0 to 1 cM (Figure 1A). In all three populations, 6.4% of markers on the consensus map were found to be polymorphic; 71.4% of markers were polymorphic in one of the three populations, and 22.3% of them were polymorphic in two of the three populations (Figure 1B, and Additional file 5). Compared to the three individual maps, the number of markers in common between any two individual maps was roughly 43% of the number of markers in the map with the least markers of the two (Figure 1C). For example, there were 3002 markers in common between PB-MU and PB-KB, which was 3002/6936 = 43.2% of the number of markers in the PB-MUU map. Also, there were 5729 markers in common between PB-KB and PB-KS, which was 5792/ 13123 = 43.6% of the number of markers in the PB-KB map. Similarly, there were 1189 markers in common among the three maps, which was 1189/6936 = 17.1% of the number of markers in the PB-MU map.Segregation distortions were estimated in the three RIL populations. For PB-KB, PB-KS, and PB-MU, 4561 (34.8%), 3686 (19.8%), and 2263 (32.6%) markers, respectively showed evidence of segregation distortion at the 0.05 significance level. The most significant (i.e., -logP) segregation distortion regions (SDRs) were observed in PB-KB, LG α : Number of linkage groups in each chromosome. UP β : Number of unique positions.followed by the PB-MU and PB-KS populations (Figure 2). The highest significant SDR was in chromosome 6BL detected in PB-KB, where -logP reached 21.6, and selection favored alleles from PBW343. In both PB-KB and PB-MU, SDRs detected in chromosome 3BS are near the Sr2 gene, where selection favored alleles from PBW343. An SDR detected in PB-KS on chromosome 7DS was in the region around the Lr34 gene, designated by Dyck [29], for resistance to leaf rust. In this region, selection favored alleles from Kenya Swara. Among all chromosomes in the three RIL populations, high segregation distortion was observed on chromosome 1B and selection favoring PBW343.Large variations for stem rust were observed in the three RILs populations. Screening for yellow and leaf rusts was also carried out (in population PB-KS) to detect pleiotropic loci linked with yellow and leaf rust resistance. Phenotypic variations for leaf and yellow rusts were observed as well, but smaller than those for stem rust (Table 1 and Figure 3). In the MS2009 (main season 2009) screening, percent stem rust severity in the PB-KB, PB-KS and PB-MU populations ranged from 10% to 70%, 1% to 60%, and 0% to 80%, respectively. During MS2010 (main season 2010), it ranged from 0% to 60%, 1% to 80%, and 0 to 80% in the PB-KB, PB-KS and PB-MU populations, respectively; in MS2011 (main season 2011), percent severity varied from 1% to 100% in population PB-MU; and in OS2010 (off season 2010), it was 5% to 80%, 0% to 100%, and 5.6% to 76.3% in PB-KB, PB-KS and PB-MU populations, respectively. Population PB-KS was screened for yellow rust in T2010 (Toluca, Mexico 2010), with percent severity ranging from 0% to 100%, and for leaf rust in OB2010 (Obregon, Mexico 2010), with percent severity ranging from 1 to 100%.Eighteen QTL regions, projected on the consensus map, were detected to be associated with APR to stem/yellow/ leaf rusts in three RIL mapping populations (Table 2 and Figure 4). QTLs were distributed on 13 chromosomes, i.e., 1B, 2A, 2B, 2D, 3A, 3B, 3D, 4A, 5B, 6B, 6D, 7A, and 7D. Well-characterized genomic regions associated with rust resistance (i.e., Sr58/Lr46/Yr29, Sr2/Yr30/Lr27 and Sr57/ Lr34/Yr18) were identified on chromosomes 1BL, 3BS and 7DS, respectively. Genes Sr58, Sr2 and Sr57 explained phenotypic variances of up to 15.9%, 37.8%, and 19.5%, respectively (Table 2). Positive alleles for the effects of Sr2 and Sr57 were contributed by non-PBW343 parents in all three populations. A positive allele for the effect of Sr58 from PBW343 was detected in population PB-KS across trials, which may be the reason for this population's transgressive stem and yellow rust resistance (Table 2 and Figure 4). Apart from these three genic regions, four separately QTLs on chromosome 2 (QSr.cim-2BS1, QSr.cim-2BS2, QSr.cim-2BL and QSr.cim-2DS) and chromosome 3 (QSr. cim-3AL, QSr.cim-3BS1, QSr.cim-3BS2 and QSr.cim-3DS) and single QTL on chromosomes 1 (QSr.cim-1BL), Figure 1 Frequency of markers on consensus map polymorphic across three populations (A); proportion of common GBS markers across the three RIL populations (B); and frequency of genetics distance (cM) between two adjacent markers on the consensus map (C). In A, 1 means markers polymorphic in one population, 2 means markers polymorphic in two populations and 3 means markers polymorphic in all three populations. 4 (QSr.cim-4AS), 5 (QSr.cim-5BL), 6 (QSr.cim-6DL) and 7 (QSr.cim-7AS) were detected (Table 3 and Figure 4). Alleles conferring APR to rust were contributed by PBW343 for QSr.cim-2DS, QSr.cim-3DS, QSr.cim-4AS and QSr.cim-5BL, and another nine regions were contributed by non-PBW343 parents. One QTL controlling leaf rust (QLr.cim-2AL) was also identified. A pleiotropic locus for APR to stem rust (Ug99) as well as yellow rust was found on chromosome 6BL (QSr/Yr.cim-6BL). QTL details in individual populations are presented in Additional files 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Genotypic and phenotypic data for QTL mapping in the three RIL populations can be found in Additional files 11, 12 and 13.A draft of the wheat genome sequence was published very recently [30]. To verify the consensus map in this study, we BLAST the sequences of 28644 GBS markers (Additional file 14) against the genome sequence of Chinese Spring [30], rye, and the D genome of Ae. tauschii with E-value < 1e-5. In general, sequences of 3619 GBS markers (that is, 34.9% of the total GBS markers) cannot hit to the genome sequence of Chinese Spring, and sequences of 12.6% of GBS markers cannot be mapped to the same chromosome in the genome sequence of Chinese Spring as that on the consensus map. Genome-wide sequences of 52.4% of GBS markers can be mapped to the same chromosome in the Chinese Spring genome sequence as that on the consensus map (Figure 5). This ratio ranges from 31.4% to 67.5% across the 21 wheat chromosomes (Figure 5). For chromosome 1B, there was a very clear enrichment for rye hits indicating the 1B/1R translocation (Figure 6). There were increased hits to Ae. tauschii on the D genome (Additional file 15).GBS is a preferred high-throughput genotyping method involving targeted complexity reduction and multiplex sequencing to produce high-quality polymorphism data at a relatively low cost per sample. Three RIL populations sharing one common parent (PBW343) were genotyped using the GBS approach. A consensus genetic linkage map distributed by 28644 markers was developed with 3757 unique positions (13.1% of the total number of markers) covering a 3302.45 cM genetic distance (Table 1; Additional files 1, 2, 3 4 and 5). Recently, a wheat genetic map of 40,267 SNP markers was reported [10] where data were generated with the help of SNP iSelect array comprising ~90,000 SNPs. On this map, 13.7% of SNPs were specified to unique positions. The percentage of unique positions in the two maps was comparable. Fewer numbers of unique markers on chromosomes were partially due to the lack of polymorphic markers evenly distributed on wheat genome, and the lack of recombination events captured by these populations.Compared with the A and D genomes, in the B genome, the maximum percentage of the total number of markers (56.3%; Table 1), the maximum percentage of the total number of unique positions (56.5%; Table 1), the longest genetic length (1635.2 cM), and the maximum number of detected QTL regions can be observed (10 out of 18; Table 2 and Figure 4). These results indicate that most of the recombination events happened on the B genome, which was in accordance with previously reported genetic maps [8,10,23,28,31] and also with genome size, since the B genome is the largest, followed by genomes A and D. Variation in the D genome of bread wheat is consistently low [9][10][11]. In the present study, 10.8% of markers on the consensus map were located on the D genome (Table 1). Yet in some regions (chromosome 3D in the PB-KB and PB-KS populations, and chromosome 7D in three populations, etc.), a high number of markers with unique positions can be observed (Additional files 1, 2, 3 and 4). Four QTL regions were detected on the D genome (Table 2). This map can be a useful resource for finding more genes located on the D genome to dissect the traits of interest.In terms of the marker distribution across populations, the highest number of polymorphic markers was available in the PB-KS population, followed by PB-KB and PB-MU (Table 1). When comparing the maps from different populations, the number of markers in common between any two maps was approximately 43% of the number of markers on the smaller map (Figure 1C). The number of markers on all three maps was 17.1% of the number of markers on the smallest map. The reduced percentage of markers in common to all maps may be due to the known structural diversity among the parents and the varying recombination frequency patterns across the genome for the three crosses. These trends indicate PBW343 may have the largest genetic distance from Kenya Swara, compared with Kingbird and Muu.Although we had 28644 markers on the consensus map, polymorphism markers are still lacking in some chromosome regions of the respective RIL population. Possible reasons are: (1) vast parts of the chromosomes of the Triticeae are recombination deserts (the so-called genetic centromeres) [30], so most meiotic recombination events occur in genomic regions that correspond to ~20% of the chromosome length, while there is little recombination in 1/3 to 2/3 of the chromosome; in the region of recombination deserts, it is difficult to explore polymorphic markers; and (2) the different variations among four parental genomes, and different genetic distances between PBW343 and the other three parents (Table 1 and Figure 2). In our study, the numbers of linkage groups for the consensus map and each of the three mapping populations were 29, 28, 43, and 35, respectively (Table 1). If two markers are physically located on the same chromosome but very far away from each other, it is very likely that they will act as unlinked loci in a population of limited size. Due to the recombination desert between them, they will fall into different linkage groups.A popular variety in South Asia, PBW343 is known for harboring the 1B/1R translocation. On the consensus map, there are 3640 markers located on chromosome 1B, with around 2251 markers on its short arm (1BS) and 1389 markers on its long arm (1BL). Only 12.0% of 3640 markers on chromosome 1B were located uniquely, which is a low proportion across 21 chromosomes. Looking at chromosome 1B specifically, 9.6% of markers are located uniquely on chromosome 1BS, while 16.3% of markers are located uniquely on chromosome 1BL. In other words, the vast majority of markers on chromosome 1BS are represented in the map as clusters of co-segregating markers. Interestingly, high segregation distortion was observed in the three populations on chromosome 1B as compared to the others (Figure 2). Also, regions on chromosome 1B having low hits to the Chinese Spring genome clearly had high hits to the rye genome (Figure 6). These phenomena could be assigned to the 1B/1R rye translocation in PBW343. In addition to the 1B/1R translocation, translocations 2D/2R and 7B/4R have also been reported in wheat. Rye has been used extensively in CIMMYT wheat breeding, and the three parents (PBW343, MUU and Kingbird) used in this study were derived from CIM-MYT germplasm. In our study, we could not find evidence of these parents carrying the 2D/2R and 7B/ 4R translocations.The consensus map constructed in this study can be used to locate major genes controlling target traits. Phenotypic variation in the three RIL populations suggests polygenic inheritance for APR to stem rust race Ug99 (Table 1 and Figure 3). QTL analysis revealed a couple of APR QTLs against stem rust fungus Ug99, which were mapped as reported. To anchor and determine the relationship between the APR QTLs found in the present study and those found in previous reports (Table 1), we calculated the correlation coefficient of the genotypes of array-based DArT markers and DArT-seq markers on the consensus map. Array-based DArT markers wPt-744022 and wPt-5896 are reported to be linked with APR to stem rust [9]. QTL QSr.cim-2BS1 reported in this study was flanked by DArT-seq markers, i.e., 4989818 and 1088282. The correlation between 4989818 and wPt-744022 was 0.81 in population PB-MU, which is highly significant. DArT-seq markers 1298718 and 1025982 were the two markers flanking QSr.cim-5BL (Table 2). The correlation between wPt-5896 and DArT-seq marker 1298718 was 0.91 in population PB-MU, which is highly significant as well (Additional files 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5). A QTL on chromosome 3BS, which is most likely the Sr2 gene (in Table 2 designated as Sr2) was flanked by DArT-seq markers 1106039 and 1140316 in population PB-MUU. According to the consensus map reported by Yu et al. [31], the Sr2 gene is 9.2 cM apart from the array-based DArT marker wPt-3761. Marker 1140316 was highly correlated with wPt-3761 in population PB-MUU (correlation coefficient: 0.75). A gene for leaf rust resistance on chromosome 7DS was mapped and flanked by DArT-seq markers 1128052 and 4991056 (Table 2). The correlation between 4991056 and wPt-733087 was 0.69, which is highly significant. Array-based DArT marker wPt-733087 was associated with leaf rust resistance and was found to be 9 cM apart from Lr34 gene-based marker csLV34 in the PBW343 × Diniza population (Singh et al., CIMMYT, unpublished).In addition to marker co-location for the above mentioned QTLs/gene(s), a recently published consensus map for Ug99 stem rust resistance loci in wheat [31] was compared with QTLs mapped in this study. Since this map did not contain GBS markers, exact co-location could not be made. However, based on the location of APR QTLs on chromosome arms for some of the QTLs, i.e., QSr.cim-2BS1, QSr.cim-2BS2, QSr.cim-2BL, QSr.cim-2DS, QSr.cim-3AL, QSr.cim-3DS, QSr.cim-1BL1 and QSr.cim-6DL could be co-located with the ones projected on the consensus map of Ug99 stem rust resistance [31]. Singh et al. [9] also reported an APR QTL for Ug99 on chromosome 7AS, which is likely the same as the one on that chromosome in the present study (Table 2 and Figure 4). QSr.cim-3BS1, QSr.cim-3BS2, QSr.cim-4AS, and QSr/Yr.cim-6BL were new QTL regions associated with stem rust and yellow rust.The high density GBS consensus map increased the mapping resolution of linkage mapping. Identified genomic regions (i.e., the genetic region of each QTL's flanking-marker interval in each individual linkage map) for stem rust resistance ranged from 0.1 to 15.8 cM (Additional file 6). The interval size of 14 of the QTLs was < =1 cM and most of them were < 5 cM (Additional file 6). QTLs in genomic regions of this size are valuable for further understanding the molecular basis and developing perfectly linked markers. Co-location of the APR QTLs/genes in their respective chromosomal regions (Table 2 and Figure 4) and a high proportion of markers BLAST to the correct chromosomes of the genome sequence of Chinese Spring (Figure 5) indicate the validity and utility of the consensus map.CIMMYT's Seeds of Discovery project has characterized more than 40,000 wheat gene bank accessions through the DArTseq GBS platform. The high density GBS consensus map reported in this study is an essential prerequisite for analyzing the GBS data of a large diversity panel. It will facilitate the genetic dissection of important quantitative traits either by linkage mapping as we reported in this paper, or by genome-wide association mapping. GBS markers associated with important traits can be utilized by designing primers according to their sequence, for genomics applications in wheat breeding.A high density map of 28644 GBS markers using genotypic data of the three RIL populations with a common parent, PBW343. Total genetic length of map was 3302.5 cM with 3757 unique positions, and the average marker distance was 0.88 cM by calculating the averaged distance between two adjacent unique positions. The length of marker intervals ranged from 0 to 28.3 cM. The number of markers in common between any two individual maps was roughly 43% of the number of markers in the map with the least markers of the two. Significant variation of segregation distortion was observed across three populations. Three genes (Sr58/Lr46/Yr29, Sr2/ Yr30/Lr27, and Sr57/Lr34/Yr18) and 15 published QTL were validated. The common parent PBW343 harbors the 1B/1R translocation, and there was a very clear enrichment for rye hits on chromosome 1B. Also, there were increased hits to Ae. Tauschii D genome. The high-density and better quality of genetic maps will advance the genetic studies of complex trait in wheat and facilitate genomics-assisted breeding.Three RIL populations were used for consensus map construction and QTL analysis for rust resistance. Moderately susceptible bread wheat (Triticum aestivum) parent PBW343 was used as a common parent and crossed with three other bread wheat APR parents: Kingbird, Kenya Swara, and Muu. PBW343, a major variety in India, is a selection (GID2430154) from CIMMYT line Attila with the pedigree Nord Deprez/VG9144//Kalyansona/Bluebird/3/Yaco/4/ Veery#5 [9]. Parents Kingbird and Kenya Swara have maintained high levels of APR to stem rust. Kingbird has shown a high level of APR in field tests conducted at Njoro, Kenya, during the last six cropping seasons, including the 2008 main season, which was characterized by very high stem rust pressure. Muu (pedigree: Pfau/Weaver//Kiritati; GID5090613) was found to be susceptible to wheat stem rust at the seedling stage but adult plants showed low disease severity in response to stem rust race Ug99 during multiple years of field trials in Kenya [32].DArTseq is a GBS platform developed by DArT PL, Canberra, Australia. It is a combination of complexity reduction methods developed initially for array-based DArT and sequencing of resulting representations on next-generation sequencing platforms. For sequencing- based DArT genotyping, two complexity reduction methods optimized for several other plant species at DArT PL (i.e., PstI/HpaII and PstI/HhaI) were used to select a subset of PstI-HpaII and PstI-HhaI fragments, respectively [23]. DNA samples were genotyped twice using two different 4-bp cutters on one end of the RE fragments (HpaII and HhaI). Although the general concept of discovering markers through sequencing of genomic representations was presented over two decades ago [33,34], it was only very recently that the cost and throughput of sequencers reached a point where any GBStype approach can compete effectively with hybridizationbased arrays (DArT and/or SNP; [11]).The DArTsoft marker extraction pipeline produced large numbers of markers in each of the three populations. Markers were filtered on the basis of reproducibility (that is, the percentage of technical replicate pairs scoring identically for a given marker), call rate (that is, the percentage of samples for which a given marker was scored), and the average read depth (that is, the average number of sequence 'tag' counts contributing to the genotype calls for a given marker). Approximately 60% of samples from each population were assayed twice to derive reproducibility scores. The minimum threshold value for reproducibility was 95%, with an average value of 98.5% for SNPs and 99% for silicoDArTs. The minimum threshold value for call rate was 85%, with an average value of 99% for SNPs and 95% for silicoDArTs. The minimum threshold value for Average Read Depth for SNPs was 7, with an average of 18; for silicoDArTs, it was 8, with an average of 17.2. Markers with identical genotypes were placed in redundant bins, and markers with unique genotypes (those that did not belong in a redundant bin) were excluded from the mapping process. This provided an additional quality control step for marker selection. The markers were selected to minimize the number of missing calls as per the selection criterion. The only filtering for 'false homozygote' calls was the masking of apparent double crossovers after ordering of the linkage groups. Genotyping errors will present themselves as apparent double crossovers in the ordered map data as 'singletons' (data points with genotype scores that differ from those of the immediately preceding and following markers) [35]. For SNP calling, the variants were called within the data only (clustering sequences by sequence similarity), and no external reference genome was used. The sequence defined as the 'Reference' for each SNP pair was either the most common sequence in the population or the sequence that had been previously recorded from DArT genotyping analyses of wheat.Our three individual maps were constructed using DArT PL's OCD MAPPING program [36], which implements a marker-ordering algorithm combined with a tunable double cross-over (DCO) masking algorithm. Markers were clustered into linkage groups according to the method described by Anderson et al. [37]. Markers with identical genotypes were placed in redundant bins, and the resulting markers/bins within each linkage group were ordered using the traveling salesman path solver program Concorde [38]. Since silicoDArT markers were dominant markers, while SNP markers were co-dominant markers, silicoDArT markers were separated into paternal and maternal phases. A map was produced for each parent by combining the relevant silicoDArT markers with all of the SNP markers. This resulted in two maps that were joined in a single population consensus map using the SNP markers in common to facilitate consensus map construction. Apparent double-crossovers were masked before reordering the linkage groups and calculating recombination fractions, with Kosambi function used to estimate genetic distances.Construction of consensus maps presents a challenging problem in wheat due to its structural diversity, particularly the chromosomal structure differences between the parents of mapping populations. We applied DArT PL's OCD MAPPING program [36] to order DArTseq, arraybased DArTs, and SSR markers. We then applied DArT PL's consensus mapping software [24,36].The parents, highly susceptible bread wheat check variety, Cacuke and the three RIL populations were evaluated for stem rust severity at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) in Njoro during four crop seasons: main season 2009, main and off-season 2010, and main season 2011, denoted as Sr-MS2009, Sr-MS2010, Sr-OS2010, and Sr-MS2011, respectively. All three populations were evaluated for APR to stem rust, and PBW343 x Kenya Swara was screened for yellow and leaf rusts in one season at one location (Additional file 12). The RILs and parents were sown using a completely randomized design with two replicates. Field plots consisted of two 1-m rows spaced 20 cm apart with a 0.5-m pathway. Approximately 60-70 seeds were sown in each plot. The experimental block was surrounded by a spreader row consisting of varieties differentially susceptible to the Sr24 virulent variant TTKST. Hill plots of spreaders were also planted in the middle of the pathway on one side of each plot to facilitate uniform disease build-up and spread. On at least two occasions just prior to booting, freshly collected urediniospores suspended in distilled water were injected into culms in the spreader plots (1-3 plants/m) using a hypodermic syringe. Disease response in the field was assessed twice, first, when the susceptible check variety Cacuke displayed 50-60% stem rust severity and subsequently at peak disease development, when Cacuke displayed 100% stem rust at the mid-dough stage of plant growth. Percent disease severity was scored using the modified Cobb Scale [39]. The second rating was considered as the phenotype in this study.Parents and population lines were evaluated for leaf rust reaction in field nurseries operated by CIMMYT in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora, Mexico, in 2010, denoted as Lr-OB2010. Replicated trials with parents and population lines were grown in Obregon in 2010. Leaf rust severity in each plot was visually scored (near anthesis flowering time) using the modified Cobb scale [39]. For yellow rust screening, parents and population lines were evaluated under field conditions in rust nurseries operated by CIMMYT near Toluca, Edo. Mexico, Mexico, in 2010 and in Njoro, Kenya, in 2010 and 2011, which were denoted as Yr-T2010, Yr-K2010, and Yr-K2011, respectively. Two replicated rows of parents and population lines were assessed in each trial. Each row was visually scored around anthesis flowering time for yellow rust severity with the percentage of leaf covered with disease infection calculated as described for leaf rust. Considering the low phenotypic variance of yellow and leaf rust resistance in the PB-KB and PB-MU populations (data not shown), we did not use them to do QTL analysis in this study. Phenotypic distribution and correlation of rust resistance across the three RIL populations are shown in Figure 3 and Additional file 12.Inclusive composite interval mapping (ICIM) [40][41][42] implemented by QTL IciMapping 3.2 (available at www. isbreeding.net) was used to map additive and epistatic QTLs controlling stem, leaf and yellow rust resistance. In ICIM for additive QTL mapping, marker selection was performed just once using stepwise regression and considering all marker information simultaneously; this is a key step in determining the scanning profile. Phenotypic values were then adjusted by all markers retained in the regression equation, except the two markers flanking the current mapping interval [40][41][42]. Permutation tests were conducted using stem rust in the three RIL populations to determine the criteria for model selection in the first step of ICIM. For all three RILs, the probability of a marker moving into the model corresponding to the overall type I error α = 0.05 was approximately 10 -5 . The probability of a marker moving out of the model was set at twice the probability of a marker moving into the model. The LOD threshold to declare the existence of a QTL was calculated by permutation tests as well. Permutation tests revealed LOD thresholds of 3.50, 3.53, and 3.51 for PB-KB, PB-KS, and PB-MU, respectively. Considering that thresholds retained from permutation tests are always conservative [43], an LOD threshold of 2.5 was used to report QTLs and determine common QTLs across seasons and populations.For epistatic QTL mapping, we tested all possible pairs of scanning positions by ICIM [41]. That is to say, we can detect digenic interactions regardless of whether the two interacting QTLs have significant additive effects or not. Due to the large amount of variables in digenic QTL mapping, we used a much stricter probability (10 -6 ) of a marker moving into the model. The probability of a marker moving out of the model was set at twice the probability of a marker moving into the model. An empirical LOD threshold of 4.0 was used to declare the existence of epistatic QTLs.Common QTL across the three RIL populations Due to the differences in the three individual linkage maps, it was difficult to directly find common QTLs across the three RIL populations based on the QTL or marker position in each linkage map. Therefore, we projected each QTL's flanking markers to the consensus map. If the flanking markers of one QTL were 15 cM apart from the flanking markers of another QTL on both sides, the two QTLs were declared as common QTLs.","tokenCount":"5433"}

data/part_5/0181568777.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"e16099cb3b23f16b38ad381a6ed15d4f","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/0c58c4cd-0e43-4082-9076-06b22dc0cb0b/retrieve","id":"-1606532763"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"04f4a8b0-c649-419c-8fa4-a6a5fe666da2","pagecount":"15","content":"It is to be noted that FEAST can't supply any magic bullet solutions but is meant to be a way to generate some basic ideas rather quickly to be taken up by local stakeholders to bring about sustainable action at local level. The tool is still in the process of fine tuning based on feedback from other partners and partners in other countries. The next steps include a second level training on the use of the final tool and use of a software for data analysis.Feed for livestock is often cited as the main constraint to improved productivity in smallholder systems. Overcoming this constraint often seems an elusive goal and technical feed interventions tend to adopt a scattergun or trial and error approach which often fails to adequately diagnose the nature of the feed problem and therefore the means to deal with it. The purpose of the Feed Assessment Tool described here is to offer a systematic and rapid methodology for assessing feed resources at site level with a view to developing a sitespecific strategy for improving feed supply and utilization through technical or organizational interventions.The tool comprises two main elements. The first is a focused PRA exercise which aims to provide an overview of the farming system with particular emphasis on livestock feed aspects. The second component is a simple and brief quantitative questionnaire, designed to be completed by experts under the guidance of the Feast facilitator. Output from Feast consists of a short report in a defined format along with some quantitative information on overall feed availability, quality and seasonality. Visit to the area meeting key local stakeholders including agriculture officials and key farmers to get a general understanding of the livestock production system  Identify target livestock systems and farmers.  Invite a representative group of approximately 15 men and women farmers to a ½ day meeting to assess the constraints and opportunities for improving livestock feeding systems. This meeting will consist of a participatory diagnosis with farmers and other stakeholders and visits to local farms to ground truth the earlier discussions and provide an opportunity for further discussion1. Introduction -Objective: Provide a clear picture of who we are, what is our purpose in being here, what we would like to do and how long it will take. -Introduce both visitors and farmers; explain the purpose and the process of meeting; give an estimate how long it will take to complete the meeting.2. General description of farming and livestock system -Objective: Obtain a general picture of the farming and livestock system so we can ask more detailed questions during the meeting. Make sure we understand the answers and ask for clarification if something is not clear. -Ask farmer to explain the crops grown and livestock raised in their area. There is no need to go into details, just a general picture of the farming and livestock system including range of farm sizes, household sizes, farm labour availability, annual rainfall pattern, irrigation availability, crops grown and cropping patterns and type and types of animals raised by households.3. Identify major income sources -Objective: How important is livestock to the livelihood of farmers? -Ask farmers to (1) list the main crops grown and other sources of income of farmers in the area, and (2) provide an estimate of importance of each income source (%). -Make sure farmers include off-farm income and remittances.-If it is difficult for farmers to provide percentages, ask them to rank the income sources from most important to least important and then ask how much the first, second and third income sources contribute to total income. -Income sources can vary a lot among households so it can be difficult to provide this answer. The main point for us is to understand how much livestock contributes to total income. Farmers will only be interested to invest time and effort into working on improving feeding systems if livestock are reasonably important to their livelihood.4. General description of the livestock production system in the area -Objective: Understand the main purpose of livestock in the farming system, and explore how farmers feed and manage livestock.-Ask farmers about: -the types of animals raised (% of households raising these animals and average holdings) -the purpose of raising these animals (e.g. draught, income, fattening, calf production) -the general animal husbandry 5. What are problems, issues, opportunities within the livestock system? Problem tree.-Objective: Find out if feed is likely to be a major factor limiting animal production and if this is recognized by farmers. -Ask the farmers to list major problems / issues -Prioritize (rank) 6. Major feed sources throughout the year -Objective: Understand the main feed resources fed to animals.-Ask the farmers to list the main feeds fed to animals -Identify the source of feed (on-farm vs. purchased) -List the approximate areas grown of the various sources, yields and/or prices for different feeds, if traded -Put this information into a table 7. Seasonal calendar (feed, labour) -Objective: Understand the seasonality of available feed resources, animal management and labour use throughout the year -Seasonal calendars can be used for understanding the seasonality of many different farm activities, issues, animal feeds, sales, body condition (when are animals very thin, fat, etc.). Here our main interests are animal feeds, management (e.g. grazing, feeding cut grass) -Ask the farmers to list the factors of interest such as major feeds fed and draw when these are fed during the year. -Ask farmers to indicate when there is a lack of feeds -Discuss if this is related mainly to quantity of feed available or if this is also an issue of feed quality -Use the seasonal calendar to discuss feeding issues during the year The questionnaire (Annex 2) is designed to be conducted with around six knowledgeable local experts. These could be local extension agents, champion farmers, milk collectors, feed suppliers etc. The idea for the questionnaire is not to gather specific information related to particular farms but to characterize the main elements of feed supply, use and milk/meat production from hypothetical farms typical of the site. The questionnaire is designed to be conducted in a group setting with guidance and discussion of the questions as they are dealt with. However, individual responses are required so that the final figures represent averages derived from a group of experts. These will not necessarily be very precise in relation to reality but provide a crude and adequate quantification of feed input and productive output from the farming system.The farms. Ask the respondents to consider farms in the area and to rank them according to wealth, either overall cultivated area or livestock holding. Three typical farms should be imagined corresponding to the wealthiest third of households, the middle third and the poorest third. These are the virtual farms we will be asking questions about.1. Family size. Does family size vary by wealth class? If not, what is the typical family size per household in adult equivalents. Adult equivalents corresponds to the number of adults (16 and over) that consume food in the household. Children between 5 and 15 could be considered as half an adult equivalent and children under 5 as a quarter of an adult equivalent 2. Animals. What is the typical composition of the livestock holding in different wealth categories of households? Non-lactating dairy cows will be mainly heifers and dry cows. Non-working draught animals will be mainly young replacement stock. What is the rough average weight of each category of animal? 3. Crops. List all crops grown on a typical farm along with representative areas for each wealth category. Then estimate the yield of material that would be fed to livestock from those areas. This might need some discussion among the group about straw to grain ratios, typical grain yields etc. 4. Non-crop feed. This will mainly consist of supplementary feeds fed on-farm. This could include agro-industrial byproducts as well as commercial concentrates.Estimate the amount of each purchased by a typical household in a year. 5. Grazing. This is tricky. Of the overall roughage intake by livestock (e. Score out of 10 for each month.For each site the Feast facilitator should produce a PRA report according to the format set out in Annex 1. This report will describe the main elements of the livestock feeding system. In addition the exercise should yield several (say 6) completed Brief Questionnaires which will provide additional information for reporting purposes. These will be analysed at ILRI. Overall analysis of feed constraints and potential interventions will be distilled from the PRA reports, the questionnaire results and through discussion between ILRI/CIAT staff and the Feast facilitator.Note: FEAST was developed at a stakeholder workshop in Hyderabad in June 09 and the prototype tool is currently being tested in a variety of locations including India, Ethiopia and Vietnam. The tool will be refined to make it as generic as possible while yielding useful information.Prepared by Alan Duncan based on inputs from Sapna Jarial and Yashpal BishtThe villages assessed (Footsil, Ganora, Dungari, Siroli, Kameda, Senti) are all characterized by mixed crop-livestock systems. Cereal and legume cropping predominate and livestock are kept mainly to supply draught power for tillage and as a source of milk for domestic consumption. Arable production is largely rainfed: in Rabi season (October-June) the main crops are wheat, barley, mustard and vegetables. In Kharif season major crops are paddy, maize, finger millet, barnyard millet, pulses and vegetables. There is a small amount of irrigated land allowing paddy rice and vegetables to be grown. Average productivity of crops (especially paddy) in irrigated land is 14-15 quintal/ha, while productivity of crops grown in rainfed land varies from 8-10 quintal/ha. Labour is generally derived from family labour. Women undertake many of the livestock-related activities particularly in collection of fodder from communal forest areas. This represents a major demand on labour as is a significant constraint within the system. The FEAST tool was first field tested in one of the villages (Mason village in Tehri district) in the state of Uttarakhand. Based on the learning it was further modified and applied in five other villages (Footsil, Ganora, Dungari, Siroli, Kameda and Senti). Analysis of information collected through PRA and questionnaires from all the villages gave the following impression. The agricultural system is largely subsistence oriented. There is some sale of vegetables and milk as cash income sources. Livestock are central to the agricultural system in supplying draught power, manure etc but management of livestock for market-oriented production is minimal. Average annual earning from sale of milk varies from Rs.10,000 to Rs.14,000/family. In addition, around 50 percent families of the village also rear goats and annual earnings from sale of goat varies from Rs.2,500 to Rs.5,000/family. As well as agricultural activities, some households derive some income from government jobs and there is presumably some remittance income from youth working outside the area.Livestock are kept primarily for draught power and manure to support arable operations. Milk production, primarily for domestic consumption, is also important. The draught power function of livestock is critical because of small plot sizes with limitations on mechanisation potential. There is seasonal migration of households to different homesteads at different altitudes to make use of agro-ecological variation. Livestock are fed using a mixture of zerograzing and free grazing. Buffaloes are largely stall fed, cattle are stall -fed during monsoon and shoats are entirely free grazed. The difficult and mountainous terrain restricts access to livestock-related services and to markets. There is little AI for example and there has been little introduction of improved genetic material. Fodder scarcity is a major issue. Although breed improvement is minimal, milk yields are even below the potential of the existing indigenous animals and feed scarcity is a major factor. Grazing land is under severe pressure and long hours are spent by women in collecting fodder from forest areas. Access to veterinary services and AI limit opportunities for enhanced animal performance. In terms of opportunities identified at village level, improved community management of common grazing resources appears promising for alleviation of feed scarcity. There also appear to be opportunities for goat rearing to exploit high local demand for goat meat.Feed supply is highly seasonal. During the monsoon season abundant grazing resources and tree leaf fodder fulfill feed needs. Seasonal shortages are reduced through storage of seasonal grasses. Concentrate feeding is minimal. Crop residues form a component of the feed resource for livestock for most of the year. The most immediate constraint for livestock production in the area is feed scarcity. In terms of feed interventions, there is limited potential for on-farm fodder production due to land scarcity. The labour required to fetch tree fodder is a major demand on the system and any potential intervention needs to aim to produce more high quality material to feed within close proximity to homesteads. The two major feed interventions in progress are planting of bunds with Congo Signal grass and Napier and introduction of improved fodder pigeon pea. Pigeon pea was selected since it is already in the system and introduction of higher biomass varieties would represent a win-win solution. However, the amount of extra biomass produced is likely to be relatively small. Introduction of high yielding grasses on bunds appears to be a promising strategy and since seasonal grasses are already harvested and stored, this strategy should fit readily into the system. An additional possibility would be introduction of improved fodder trees on bunds in the form of hedges.There could be merit in considering the commodity focus of the livestock enterprise. Most attention has been directed toward dairy production to date and the establishment of mini-dairies is impressive. However, the difficult terrain and market accessibility present problems for production of a perishable commodity such as milk. An alternative commodity could be live goat sales since there appears to be strong demand at competitive prices for finished goats. There could be a case for developing a goat rearing system based on confined feeding on tree forage and grass. A market feasibility study would be the first step in developing this option.This analysis and thoughts on interventions need to be part of a participatory process of enhancing livestock production based on dialogue with farmers and other local stakeholders. Based on experiences in Ethiopia and in Vietnam, attempts to deal with feed scarcity seem to be most successful when tackled by a stakeholder group through regular meetings and a rolling joint action plan. The assessment presented here is merely a means of providing an external assessment of the current situation and ways of changing it. This could be used as a discussion starter for a stakeholder dialogue. Such stakeholder groups work well with diverse actors from research, extension, NGO's, milk co-operatives, farmer groups etc. The next stage could be establishment of such local stakeholder groups (or strengthening existing ones). -General description of the livestock production system in the area. Objective: Understand the main purpose of livestock in the farming system, and explore how farmers feed and manage livestock. What types of animals are raised (% of households raising these animals and average holdings) and their purposes e.g. draught, income, fattening, calf production. How are these animals managed in terms of housing veterinary care, breeding etc?-What are problems, issues, opportunities within the livestock system? Objective: Find out if feed is likely to be a major factor limiting animal production and if this is recognized by farmers. List the major problems and issues identified by farmers along with their rankings in terms of importance.-Major feed sources throughout the year. Objective: Understand the main feed resources fed to animals. Describe the main feeds fed to animals and their sources (on-farm vs. purchased). List the approximate areas grown of the various sources, yields and/or prices for different feeds, if traded.-Seasonal calendar (feed, labour). Objective: Understand the seasonality of available feed resources, animal management and labour use throughout the year. Produce a seasonal calendar along the lines described above.- ","tokenCount":"2644"}

data/part_5/0199400818.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"f25d6ef278dfe59904f75c0431685480","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/eb61ad3c-7931-4fa6-b5b5-dee8050ec45e/retrieve","id":"-1013035644"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"b28f0d75-340c-4d70-8020-0270cba11df8","pagecount":"30","content":"Although CSAq brings higher economic and environmental benefits to adopters, broader adoption and scaling of CSAq practices faced several challenges and required supportive measures. To understand the factors affecting the adoption of CSAq, an econometric model was applied with data collected from 200 aquaculture farms. The results indicated that 69.4% of farmer's CSAq adoption behavior can be explained by economic efficiency(30.2%) higher price of products (16.0%); access to technical information (14.9%); pond environmental improvement; the household's labor availability; and food security. Improving economic efficiency and raising awareness about CSAq system among farmers are important measures to be done.Với sự hỗ trợ kỹ thuật và tài chính của Chương trình biến đổi khí hậu, Nông nghiệp và An ninh lương thực (CCAFS) và Trung tâm Nghề cá thế giới (WorldFish), nghiên cứu này sử dụng mô hình thống kê probit để đo lường các yếu tố ảnh hưởng đến quyết định áp dụng mô hình nuôi trồng thuỷ sản thông minh với BĐKH (CSAq) của người nuôi tại 5 huyện ven biển Thanh Hóa-tỉnh đại diện cho vùng duyên hải Bắc Trung bộ. Số liệu sơ cấp được thu thập từ phỏng vấn ngẫu nhiên 200 người nuôi tôm quảng canh cải tiến. Kết quả cho thấy có 6 yếu tố chính ảnh hưởng thuận chiều đến việc người nuôi có quyết định áp dụng mô hình CSAq, bao gồm: số lượng lao động sẵn có của gia đình, khả năng tiếp cận thông tin mô hình CSAq, giá thị trường của các sản phẩm từ mô hình, hiệu quả kinh tế khi áp dụng mô hình, đảm bảo an ninh lương thực, sự cải thiện về mặt môi trường khi giảm đáng kể lượng bùn thải. Các biến độc lập trong mô hình giải thích được 69,41% quyết định áp dụng CSAq của người nuôi. Trong đó, yếu tố hiệu quả kinh tế mà CSAq mang lại có ảnh hưởng nhiều nhất (30,2%), tiếp đến là yếu tố giá bán sản phẩm từ mô hình CSAq (16,0%) và khả năng tiếp cận nguồn thông tin từ hệ thống khuyến ngư (14,9%). Từ đó, việc cải thiện hiệu quả kinh tế thông qua chuỗi giá trị như cải thiện chất lượng và giá cả của sản phẩm và nâng cao nhận thức về CSAq là giải pháp quan trọng để tiếp tục nhân rộng CSAq tại vùng ven biển Thanh Hoá.Từ khóa: Nuôi trồng thủy sản thông minh với biến đổi khí hậu (CSAq), áp dụng, yếu tố ảnh hưởng, cá rô phi.Nuôi trồng thủy sản (NTTS) ven biển Bắc Trung Bộ nói chung và Thanh Hoá nói riêng, đóng vai trò quan trọng trong đời sống kinh tế-xã hội, và là sinh kế quan trọng của người dân ven biển. Thời gian gần đây, NTTS ven biển địa phương đang đối mặt với nhiều rủi ro do những tác động tiêu cực của biến đổi khí hậu (BĐKH). Sự bất thường của các đợt nắng nóng kéo dài, lượng mưa thay đổi không theo quy luật và sự biến động lớn về độ mặn tại các vùng nuôi gây ảnh hưởng đến tỉ lệ sống và khả năng sinh trưởng của loài nuôi. Việc tăng lượng mưa cục bộ và thay đổi độ mặn đột ngột trong mùa mưa mà chủ yếu là do bão và lũ lụt gây ra đã ảnh hưởng tới việc điều tiết nước của vùng nuôi và sự sinh trưởng, phát triển của các đối tượng nuôi, đặc biệt là tôm sú. Do vậy, việc quản lí rủi ro cùng với việc cải thiện hiệu quả, năng suất nuôi, tăng khả năng chống chịu với BĐKH thông qua đa dạng hoá đối tượng nuôi và các can thiệp về kỹ thuật nuôi theo cách tiếp cận CSAq là việc làm cần thiết, nhằm đảm bảo an ninh lương thực, ổn định kinh tế và tăng khả năng chống chịu với tác động của BĐKH cho các gia đình NTTS.  (Batz và cộng sự, 1999), giảm sử dụng đầu vào (Feder và cộng sự, 1985), sử dụng hiệu quả vốn (Katiha và cộng sự, 2005), giảm rủi ro về giá thị trường, tỉ lệ sống,.. (Tsur và cộng sự, 1990), mức độ tương thích với nhu cầu của người nuôi (Rogers, 1995), mức độ phức tạp của công nghệ mới với hiểu biết của người nuôi (Rogers, 1995). Đối với hiệu quả kinh tế, yếu tố để người nuôi xem xét trước khi đưa ra quyết định bao gồm khả năng sinh lời của kỹ thuật mới (Griliches, 1957), giá cả thị trường của sản phẩm (Feder và cộng sự, 1985), sự sẵn có của vốn (Salter, 1960), sự sẵn có của lao động (Binswanger và Rosenzweig, 1986). Đối với đặc điểm khu NTTS, yếu tố như qui mô khu sản xuất (Globerman, 1975), quyền và thời hạn sở hữu đất đai của người nuôi có thể ảnh hưởng tới quyết định có áp dụng công nghệ mới của người nuôi hay không. Đối với các yếu tố về đặc điểm hộ gia đình, tuổi tác được xem là yếu tố có thể tác động thuận chiều (Shields, 1993)   Trong đó, X i là các biến độc lập thể hiện các yếu tố ảnh hưởng đến quyết định áp dụng mô hình CSAq, β là các vector ước lượng các biến độc lập tác động đến khả năng ra quyết định dụng mô hình CSAq (\uD835\uDC5D \uD835\uDC56 ).Khi đó, hàm mô phỏng xác suất ra quyết định của người nuôi \uD835\uDC39(\uD835\uDC4B \uD835\uDC56 , \uD835\uDEFD ′ ) = \uD835\uDEFD \uD835\uDC56 ′ \uD835\uDC4B \uD835\uDC56 + \uD835\uDC62 \uD835\uDC56 với \uD835\uDC39(\uD835\uDC4B \uD835\uDC56 , \uD835\uDEFD ′ ) là biến ẩn không quan sát được (latent variables), u i là sai số ngẫu nhiên của mô hình.\uD835\uDC39(\uD835\uDC4B \uD835\uDC56 , \uD835\uDEFD ′ )= � 0 \uD835\uDC5Bế\uD835\uDC62 \uD835\uDC39(\uD835\uDC4B \uD835\uDC56 , \uD835\uDEFD ′ ) < 0, \uD835\uDC41\uD835\uDC54ườ\uD835\uDC56 \uD835\uDC5B\uD835\uDC62ô\uD835\uDC56 \uD835\uDC58ℎô\uD835\uDC5B\uD835\uDC54 á\uD835\uDC5D \uD835\uDC51ụ\uD835\uDC5B\uD835\uDC54 \uD835\uDC5Aô ℎì\uD835\uDC5Bℎ \uD835\uDC36\uD835\uDC46\uD835\uDC34\uD835\uDC5E 1 \uD835\uDC5Bế\uD835\uDC62 \uD835\uDC39(\uD835\uDC4B \uD835\uDC56 , \uD835\uDEFD ′ ) > 0, \uD835\uDC41\uD835\uDC54ườ\uD835\uDC56 \uD835\uDC5B\uD835\uDC62ô\uD835\uDC56 á\uD835\uDC5D \uD835\uDC51ụ\uD835\uDC5B\uD835\uDC54 \uD835\uDC5Aô ℎì\uD835\uDC5Bℎ \uD835\uDC36\uD835\uDC46\uD835\uDC34\uD835\uDC5E �Như vậy, mô hình Probit có dạng:   + Face to face interview of 200 aqua. farmers in 10 coastal communes, including non-tilapia integration and tilapia integration farms. Detailed structure of surveyed households was given as below:1 Global Alliance This acitivity focused on analysing data and writing working paper. All collected data from the field survey were cleaned, synthesized and analyzed using Excel and Stata.+ Data collected from FGDs were synthesized and organised in the form of qualitative information.+ Data collected from HH survey were cleaned and coded in excel and stata for analysing. After cleaning, 182 HH surveyed questionnaires were used for the research.The paper has already been completed in Vietnamese and will be published in the journal of Agriculture and Rural Development (already worked with the Journal Board).This paper is currently being translated into English in format of a working paper to submit in CCAFS website.Among research activities, the stakeholder workshop was also held in Thanhhoa   ","tokenCount":"1163"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"287e995b943a90f2ae36248d17cc3660","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/01f5c92c-d5bb-4cce-ab64-78254404cec3/retrieve","id":"-141610867"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"a6b23b7b-cec2-4771-b4a8-2b48afd709c0","pagecount":"16","content":"NPPOs in at least eight targeted LMICs (three in Africa; two in Asia; three in La�n America) par�cipate in the \"Global Plant Diagnos�c & Surveillance Network\" dynamically exchanging data and knowledge on exis�ng/emerging P&D.Resilient Agrifood Systems AA NARES and Regional Agricultural Research Ins�tutes develop farming system innova�ons with the poten�al to increase the food security of smallholders in targeted areas.At least 20 na�onal partners in 8 targeted LMICs use the exis�ng/novel diagnos�c and surveillance tools to effec�vely counter exis�ng/emerging plant health threats.At least eight target NPPOs increase their capacity to u�lize epidemiological modelling data & decision support tools for pest risk assessment, and preparedness to counter priori�zed P&D threats and new invasions.A \"Global Plant Health Consor�um\" comprising 40-50 ins�tu�ons is opera�onal, codeveloping and deploying IPDM innova�on packages for effec�ve plant health management.Adop�on of eco-friendly and climate-smart IPDM innova�ons by at least three million smallholders across ten targeted LMICs results in reduc�on in crop losses (by at least five percent) and use of toxic pes�cides (by at least ten percent).At least 15 private sector partners in four focal countries in Africa commercialize Aflasafe to ~200,000 smallholders (~400,000 ha of maize), resul�ng in enhanced availability of safe and nutri�ous food and feed.At least 300,000 smallholder farmers use affordable & easy-to-use pre-and post-harvest innova�ons for mi�ga�ng mycotoxin contamina�on.Plant health research community in at least six targeted LMICs uses needs assessment evidence and data to develop demand-driven, equitable and scalable IPDM & IMM innova�ons.Na�onal and regional partners in at least six LMICs u�lize validated scaling approaches for P&D detec�on and surveillance, IPDM and IMM.Based on science-based Plant Health Policy Briefs, investors and decision makers in targeted regions create an enabling environment for R4D and scaling of plant health innova�ons.End hunger for all and enable affordable healthy diets for the 3 billion people who do not currently have access to safe and nutri�ous food.Li� at least 500 million people living in rural areas above the extreme poverty line of US $1.90 per day (2011 PPP).Close the gender gap in rights to economic resources on, access to ownership of, and control over land and natural resources, for more than 500 million women who work in food, land, and water systems.Equip 500 million small-scale producers to be more resilient to climate shocks, with climate adapta�on solu�ons available through na�onal innova�on systems.Stay within planetary and regional environmental boundaries: consump�ve water use in food produc�on of less than 2500 km3 per year (with a focus on the most stressed basins), zero net deforesta�on, nitrogen applica�on of 90 Tg per year (with redistribu�on towards low-input farming systems) and increased use efficiency, and phosphorus applica�on of 10 Tg per year.Bridging Knowledge Gaps and Networks: Plant Health Threat Iden�fica�on and Characteriza�on.Risk Assessment, Data management and Guiding Preparedness for Rapid Response.Integrated Pest and Disease Management.Tools and processes for protec�ng food chains from mycotoxin contamina�on.Equitable and inclusive scaling of plant health innova�ons to achieve impacts.Section 2: Progress on science and towardsThis is a simple, linear, and static representation of a complex, nonlinear, and dynamic reality. Feedback loops and connections between this Initiative and other Initiatives' theories of change are excluded for clarity.End of Initiative outcome AA Action Area IA Impact Area SDG Sustainable Development Goal Note: A summary of Work Package progress ratings is provided in Section 3.In 2023, PHI teams at the CGIAR Centers, together with 180 research/innovation and scaling partners globally, made significant progress in achieving the outputs and outcomes across the five Work Packages.PHI-WP1 (bridging knowledge gaps and networks on plant health threat identification and characterization) is implemented by seven CGIAR Centers (AfricaRice, Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT, CIP, CIMMYT, IITA, IRRI and ILRI) in collaboration with 65 partner organizations, which are playing a key role in the regional diagnostics and surveillance networks. The strategic locations of the CGIAR Centers in the global South, coupled with the expertise in P&D identification and characterization, facilitated partnerships with national plant protection organizations (NPPOs), national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES), and ministries of agriculture spanning 34 countries across 4 regions (18 in Africa, 6 in Asia, 6 in Latin America and the Caribbean [LAC], and 4 in Central and West Asia and North Africa [CWANA]). Building upon insights gained in 2022 through a global online survey of knowledge and capacity gaps in diagnostics and surveillance of P&Ds, the team planned context-based capacity strengthening and conducted 13 training sessions to improve NPPOs' detection and surveillance capabilities in 10 targeted LMICs. Also, WP1 focused on developing and improving detection tools/innovations for characterization, monitoring, and surveillance and supported surveillance activities in 21 LMICs for more than 20 P&Ds on 8 crops (banana, cassava, enset, forages, maize, potato, rice, wheat). WP1 also ensured that at least 25 national partners in 10 targeted LMICs use novel diagnostic/ surveillance tools. PHI-WP2 made significant progress on developing standard procedures for ensuring equitable access and optimizing use of P&D data management systems across various regions, thereby enhancing risk assessment, modeling, and communication regarding several emerging P&Ds. Noteworthy achievements include pest emergence prediction and understanding of virulence variation related to postflowering stalk rot in South Asia; identification of novel strains of Rice Blast and rice yellow mottle virus in Uganda and Côte d'Ivoire; legume viruses in Ethiopia and Lebanon, etc. The team is also monitoring virulence variations of wheat rust pathogens, Fusarium head blight in wheat, yam mosaic virus, bakanae disease of rice, potato psyllid, etc., using sentinel plots in different countries across Africa, Asia, and LAC. Pest risk models for African armyworm and FAW, and predisposing factors of Maize Lethal Necrosis (MLN) spread in East and Southern Africa, were analyzed. Significant enhancements were made to plant health data management platforms, facilitating information access for modelling, risk predictions, and data-driven decision-support tools for P&D control in LMICs. Remote sensing, drones and AI models were used to monitor crops and media reports on major P&D occurrence for early warning. The data generated by the team is instrumental in advocacy and engaging policy makers regarding P&D containment strategies.In 2023, PHI-WP3 (integrated pest and disease management/IPDM) team across six CGIAR Centers worked closely with 68 partners to develop/validate/deploy eco-friendly and climate-smart IPDM innovations and to validate these through Plant Health Innovation Platforms. Multiinstitutional and multidisciplinary collaborative efforts resulted in development/validation of diverse technologies, including botanicals, biological control, biopesticides, and ecological engineering for integrated management of major diseases (e.g., banana bunchy top disease (BBTD), banana Fusarium wilt TR4, chickpea and lentil viruses and their vectors, wheat blast, etc.), insect pests (e.g., African rice gall midge, cowpea pests, aphids and pod borers of food legumes, cassava whitefly, fruit fly, etc.), and parasitic weeds of Faba bean. Decision-support tools have been developed to enable MLN-free commercial seed production and potato late blight management. Capacity building events were organized in several countries, including Ethiopia, Lebanon, Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria, Mali, Mexico, Ecuador, Bangladesh, etc. PHI-WP4 (integrated mycotoxin management) team has continued fostering nurturing relationships with private sector, local and international NGOs, including in Asian countries, for reducing mycotoxin contamination in staple crops. The team implemented activities for effectively transferring mycotoxin control technologies in maize, groundnut, rice, and sorghum in targeted regions, including extension of shelf-life of dry spores sent to Aflasafe manufacturers and optimizing formulations. Biocontrol testing in maize, groundnut, and sorghum generated effectiveness data to register products in Mali, Rwanda, DR Congo, Uganda, Burundi, and Sudan. Aflasafe manufacturers and distributors in 10 African countries received technical support, besides new manufacturers in Mozambique, DR Congo, and Burundi. PHI also worked closely with local communities, extension workers, and other stakeholders to raise awareness and to improve knowledge/skills on mycotoxin prevention and management.PHI-WP5 focuses on gender equality, social inclusion, and impact assessment, in close interface with other Work Packages. In 2023, the WP5 team addressed gender and social inclusion in plant health management by developing interdisciplinary research tools/methods collectively through the Global Research Network on Gender and Plant Health. Insights from the studies undertaken collaboratively by seven CGIAR Centers (AfricaRice, Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, CIP, CIMMYT, IRRI, and IITA) in 2023 enabled improvement of the design of digital decision-support tools, such as Tumaini App (an AI-powered application for detecting pests and diseases), and a potato late blight handheld-decision-support tool, and recommendations toward training methods that are responsible to women's needs. On the impact assessment front, 2121 households were surveyed in a RCT aiming to examine adoption and impacts of Aflasafe among small-scale farmers in Nigeria. Baseline data from 1200 households were collected and analyzed in another RCT investigating adoption and impacts of Push-Pull Technology (PPT) among maize producers in Uganda. A phone survey of 398 farmers in 57 communities in Kenya was organized to assess the current levels of FAW and MLN, farmers' awareness and practice of control options, and the use of extension and mobile phones for accessing relevant information. All the three impact assessment studies have significant gender components. Efforts by the WP2 team enhanced knowledge on emerging P&Ds and aided in developing risk prediction models for preparedness to counter pest threats (WP2-OC2). This includes using data science to predict FAW outbreaks in Africa; combating BBTD in Nigeria, Uganda, and Tanzania; and creating risk prediction models for Fusarium head blight and wheat blast in Mexico, Bangladesh, and Zambia. Phytosanitary expert assessments determined predisposing factors of MLN in Africa, and potato psyllid in Central America. AI models were established to monitor global media reports on major P&D occurrences and detect banana Fusarium wilt in real-time using unmanned aerial vehicles. EOIO 4: A \"Global Plant Health Consortium\" comprising 40-50 institutions is operational, co-developing and deploying IPDM innovation packages for effective plant health management.In 2023, the PHI-WP3 team, in partnership with 68 non-CGIAR partners, including an array of research/innovation and scaling partners, is codeveloping and deploying IPDM innovation packages against prioritized plant health threats. \"Plant Health Innovation Platforms\" in Kenya and Lebanon undertook work on integrating, co-developing and co-validating IPDM innovation packages of viruses and their vectors on faba bean and on FAW in maize through participatory engagement of researchers, extension personnel, and smallholder farmers. In 2023, eco-friendly plant health innovations or IPDM packages were adopted by an estimated 461,698 smallholders in 20 targeted LMICs (Africa-11; Asia-5; LAC-2; CWANA-2) in the global South. Capacity building of national partners, extension personnel, and farming communities was also intensively undertaken in over 20 countries on various aspects of IPDM for effective management of various plant health threats affecting cereals, food legumes, roots, tubers, banana, and tomato. The PHI-WP4 team conducted experiments to extend the shelf life of dry spores sent to five private-sector Aflasafe manufacturers, improved field performance, and optimized formulations. The team generated effectiveness data to register products in Mali, Rwanda, DR Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Sudan, and Mexico. WP4 continued supporting 5 private-sector manufacturers and 11 distributors of Aflasafe in 10 African countries; and developed and nurtured relationships with local and international NGOs demanding aflatoxin-reduced crops. Commercialization strategies defining the best ways to scale Aflasafe were produced for Uganda and Burundi. Technical support on the design of Aflasafe manufacturing facilities and the installation and fine-tuning of appropriate equipment was provided to manufacturers in Mozambique, DR Congo, and Burundi. The WP4 team engaged with farmers, private-sector entities, researchers, and development partners to foster collaboration in co-developing and adopting mycotoxin management tools. The team provided training and technical assistance to 10 extension agencies and 20 privatesector actors involved in crop value chains to enable them to effectively implement IMM strategies. PHI also raised awareness among consumers about the importance of mycotoxin management and initiated pilot projects to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of IMM in reducing mycotoxin contamination along value chains.Gender-responsive assessment tools to identify men's and women's plant health management needs, constraints, and interests are codeveloped by interdisciplinary teams. In 2023, results from six countries (Kenya, Peru, Uganda, Rwanda, Benin, and Côte d'Ivoire) have informed PHI's technology developers and national partners to improve innovation/technology design and/or scaling approaches.EOIO 9: National and regional partners in at least six LMICs use validated scaling approaches for P&D detection and surveillance, IPDM and IMM.Built on six scoping studies and needs assessment evidence in 2022, the PHI team made significant progress through two RCTs in 2023 to investigate adoption and impacts of Aflasafe in Nigeria and push-pull technology against FAW in Uganda.Results from the two RCTs the PHI team implemented in 2023 will provide evidence-based plant health policy recommendations in 2024 on suitable scaling approaches for innovations contributing to IMM, and integrated pest management (IPM) of FAW in Africa. This, in turn, will contribute to the creation of an enabling environment for research for development (R4D) on IMM and IPM in countries in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Nigeria and Kenya, and scaling gender-appropriate plant health innovations.Section 3: Work Package progress WP1: Bridging Knowledge Gaps and Networks: Plant Health Threat Characterization Q On track Output 1. A map of relevant stakeholders and a report on key knowledge and capacity gaps on diagnos�cs, characteriza�on, es�ma�ng damage levels, and surveillance of emerging P&D.A connected and func�onal diagnos�c network of CGIAR and external partners (e.g., NPPOs, Universi�es) established in 10 countries, providing an advanced pla�orm for plant P&D diagnos�cs and surveillance.A toolbox for molecular detec�on and image recogni�on, characteriza�on, monitoring and surveillance of a broad range of P&D co-developed and deployed for use by NPPOs, NARES, extension staff and farmers in LMICs.provided to decision makers within selected countries and to WP2 for repositories and risk assessment analysis.CGIAR centers, innova�ons partners and NPPOs jointly build skills diagnos�cs and surveillance and increase donors' investment for capacity strengthening of NPPOs in at least 8 target countries.Na�onal partners in at least 8 LMICs are part of a global diagnos�c and surveillance network for exchanging knowledge on tools, methods and data for a broad range of P&D (40% female, 30% young scien�sts).NPPOs, NARES, extension workers and farmers across eight LMICs have available and use a set of tools and methods for lab/field detec�on, characteriza�on, monitoring and surveillance of a broad range of P&D (50% women, 30% youth plant doctors).Na�onal partners in 8 countries using occurrence and incidence data of 3 selected P&Ds for risk assessment analysis and modelling.NPPOs in at least 8 targeted LMICs (three in Africa; two in Asia; three in La�n America) par�cipate in the \"Global Plant Diagnos�c & Surveillance Network\" dynamically exchanging data and knowledge on exis�ng/emerging P&D.At least 20 na�onal partners in 8 targeted LMICs use the exis�ng/novel diagnos�c and surveillance tools to effec�vely counter exis�ng/emerging plant health threats.During 2023, WP1 continued working on bridging networks and knowledge gaps on plant health threat identification and characterization across 34 countries, in collaboration with 65 organizations, mostly NPPOs. The interinstitutional collaborations aimed at developing and implementing context-based capacity strengthening plans with NPPOs within each region, building on insights gained in 2022 (WP1-OP1/OP2). Based on consultations and prioritization, 13 in-person training sessions were organized. The goal was to strengthen regional diagnostic and surveillance capacity. Over 20 molecular and image-based AI tools for detection, characterization, monitoring, and surveillance were developed/ improved or validated in collaboration with 9 innovation partners (WP1-OP3). Leveraging some of these tools, WP1 supported national institutions surveillance efforts for various crops, including banana (7 countries, Africa/Asia/LAC, for Fusarium wilt TR4 and banana bunchy top disease); cassava (5 countries, Africa/Asia, for viruses and whitefly); enset (Ethiopia for Paraputo ensete and Xanthomonas wilt); forages (Ethiopia for Alfalfa mosaic virus and southern bean mosaic virus); maize (6 countries in Africa for Fall armyworm and Maize lethal necrosis); potato (6 countries, Africa/LAC, for potato purple top disease and Late blight); rice (3 countries, Africa/Asia, for Southern rice black-streaked dwarf virus, rice blast); and wheat (4 countries, Africa/CWANA/LAC, for wheat blast, Fusarium head blight, wheat rust, yellow rust/stem rust) (WP1-OP4). The progress made in 2023 across the four outputs of WP1 have contributed to achieving the proposed End of Initiative outcomes, namely: (i) enhancing NPPOs' detection and surveillance capabilities in at least 8 targeted LMICs while participating in a plant diagnostic and surveillance network, and (ii) at least 20 national partners in these LMICs use modern diagnostic and surveillance tools to effectively counter plant health threats. 3. Standard procedures for equitable access and op�mum use of P&D data management systems for risk assessment, modelling, and communica�ons.Improved PH data management system with data harnessing tools.2. SWOT report with augmenta�on plans to integrate P&D data and improved data management systems for OneCGIAR and partners.5. Models for predic�ng P&D risks and shi�s due to climate change and other factors.6. Knowledge on P&D shi�s and virulence varia�on with strategies for augmen�ng IPDM and resistance breeding. 9. Generic/specific pest risk assessment and preparedness plans for at least 8 priori�zed P&D cases.Knowledge on biosecurity risks to seed delivery pathways and integrated seed health protec�on strategies.10. Fit-for-purpose communica�on, advocacy, and capacity development strategies and policy briefs (at least 2-3) with ac�onable recommenda�ons to target LMICs.Strategies for sampling for mycotoxin tes�ng priori�za�on for IMM interven�ons.Enhanced PH data management system aiding CGIAR researchers and partners pest risk assessment and preparedness for efficient P&D control in the target LMICS.Knowledge on poten�al invasive and emerging risks for at least 8 P&Ds used to establish preparedness and response ac�ons by demand partners in target LMICs.At least 20 na�onal partners in 8 targeted LMICs use the exis�ng/novel diagnos�c and surveillance tools to effec�vely counter exis�ng/emerging plant health threats.At least eight target NPPOs increase their capacity to u�lize epidemiological modelling data & decision support tools for pest risk assessment, and preparedness to counter priori�zed P&D threats and new invasions.A \"Global Plant Health Consor�um\" comprising 40-50 ins�tu�ons is opera�onal, codeveloping and deploying IPDM innova�on packages for effec�ve plant health management.In 2023, the PHI-WP2 team has significantly advanced standard procedures for ensuring equitable access and optimizing the utilization of P&D data management systems across various regions, thereby enhancing partners' capabilities for risk assessment, modelling, and communication regarding several emerging P&Ds (WP2-OC1). Noteworthy achievements include pest emergence prediction (WP2-05) and virulence variation (WP2-06) related to post-flowering stalk rot in South Asia; novel strains of Rice Blast and Yellow Mottle Virus in Uganda and Cote d'Ivoire; legume viruses in Ethiopia and Lebanon; monitoring virulence variations using sentinel plots of wheat rust pathogens in Ethiopia, Kenya, India and Pakistan; Fusarium head blight in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal; identification of new phylogenetic groups of yam mosaic virus in Nigeria; emergence of Bakane disease of rice in West Africa; potato psyllid in Peru; risk models for African armyworm and FAW; and predisposing factors of MLN spread in East and Southern Africa. Furthermore, significant enhancements were made to plant health data management platforms (WP2-04), facilitating information access for modelling (WP2-03), risk predictions, and data-driven decision-support tools for P&D control in LMICs (WP2-OC2). This includes development of an updated web platform for Insect Life Cycle Modeling (ILCYM) to determine pest outbreaks; a refined EPIRICE model to forecast rice blast and brown spot dynamics; integration of the NextStrain module for genomic surveillance of cassava geminiviruses in Southeast Asia and potexviruses in LAC; wheat rust and blast early warning system in Bangladesh and Zambia; a Sentinel-2-based cropland map for improving wheat rust detection and forecasting models; deployment of remote sensing and AI models for mapping BBTD in Nigeria; enhancement of the Tumaini AI platform for real-time surveillance of banana diseases; and AI models to monitor media reports on major P&D occurrence for early warning. Adop�on of eco-friendly and climate-smart IPDM innova�ons by at least three million smallholders across 10 targeted LMICs results in reduc�on in crop losses (by at least 5%) and use of toxic pes�cides (by at least 10%).During 2023, the PHI-WP3 team made significant progress on several fronts; for example, a) the WP3 team, including partners, developed/ validated an array of innovations, including biological control (e.g., banana Fusarium wilt; root knot and burrowing nematodes of vegetables); biorationals and biopesticides (e.g., African rice gall midge and rice stem borers, aphids and pod borers of food legumes; aphid vector of BBTV; FAW on maize; cassava whitefly, fruit fly, etc.); ecological engineering (e.g., rice pests), etc. (WP3-OP2); b) capacity building of 527 national partners (44 percent women), including post-graduate students, scientists, and extension personnel, and over 1350 farmers (45 percent women) in over 20 countries, including Ethiopia, Lebanon, Kenya, Zambia, Nigeria, Mali, Mexico, Ecuador, and Bangladesh, to strengthen knowledge/skills on various aspects of IPDM in 9 crops; the topics included production and exchange of pathogen-free clean seed/planting materials, integrating host plant resistance with biological control, community-based biopesticide production, gender and social inclusion in plant health management, etc. (WP3-OP3 & OP7); c) Plant Health Innovation Platform at Qos Elias, Lebanon, enabled demonstration of various IPM-based innovations for managing viruses and their vectors on faba bean and FAW in maize (WP3-OP4); d) decision-support tools for MLN virus-free clean commercial seed production in maize and for potato late blight management were developed (WP3-OP5); and f) strong linkages established with complementary projects on plant health management (e.g., Plant Health efforts of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), etc.) toward operationalizing a \"Global Plant Health Consortium\" (WP3-OC1). 2. Six bioprotectants registered with regulators for me further scale up and at least 4 manufacturing and distribu�on (M&D) partners of aflatoxin bioprotectant licensed.3. 400,000 ha treated with aflatoxin bioprotectants in at least 5 LMICs and no less than 200,000 farmers have access to aflatoxin-conscious markets.Mycotoxins-crop-countries and cost -effec�ve integrated mycotoxin management (IMM) components selected based on evidence.Effec�ve pre-and post-harvest IMM technologies and their convergence with policy, ins�tu�onal and traceability innova�ons to reduce mycotoxin contamina�on by at least 70%.sector in crop value chains using IMM to reach at least 100,000 farmers.Strengthened local, na�onal & regional capacity to use bioprotectants as part of IMM.New Private Sector partners enabled to sustainably manufacture & distribute bioprotectants in four LMICs.Strengthened capacity of publicprivate stakeholders to manage mycotoxins through IMM innova�ons across the value chains used in at least five LMICs.At least 15 private sector partners in four focal countries in Africa commercialize Aflasafe to ~200,000 smallholders (~400,000 ha of maize), resul�ng in enhanced availability of safe and nutri�ous food and feed.At least 300,000 smallholder farmers use affordable & easy-to-use pre-and post-harvest innova�ons for mi�ga�ng mycotoxin contamina�on .Work Package 4 progress against the theory of change PHI-WP4 (integrated mycotoxin management) works toward validating (e.g., smart storage) and strengthening scaling diverse preharvest (e.g., biocontrol) and postharvest (e.g., nixtamalization) mycotoxin control interventions to reduce consumer exposure to mycotoxins and for smallholder farmers to obtain access to premium markets. In 2023, the team achieved several outputs including: a) publications based on research to understand multiple-year application on carry-over of biocontrol in small-and large-scale agricultural fields; b) continuation of effectiveness trials in Niger, Rwanda, DR Congo, Burundi, Uganda and Mexico to gather data to prepare and submit registration dossiers for aflatoxin biocontrol products (WP4-OP1); c) obtained provisional registration of biocontrol products for use in Rwanda and Uganda (WP4-OP2); d) developed an Aflasafe commercialization strategy for Uganda; e) renewed technology transfer and licensing agreements with privatesector manufacturing partners in Nigeria and Senegal (WP4-OC2); f) extended partnerships with NARES (e.g., KALRO), advanced research institutes in the US, extension agencies, NGOs (e.g., Sasakawa Africa Association, World Food Programme, FAO) and private-sector partners (e.g., Delish and Nutri) in 12 countries (e.g., Cameroon, Kenya) to reach the targeted number of farmers (WP4-OC1); g) protecting crops of more than 57,000 farmers in 9 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, Senegal and The Gambia, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and Mali) with aflatoxin management strategies (WP4-OP3); and h) organized and gave presentations in high-level meetings (e.g., fair for BMGF, African Union Commission-PACA, International Organization of Biological Control and International Plant Pathology Congress meetings). In addition, WP4 members attended workshops in target countries (e.g., Azerbaijan) and regions (e.g., APAARI countries) which requested assistance from PHI based on its impactful mycotoxin control strategies, supported by empirical evidence and field-based effectiveness. WP4 also reorganized its objectives and activities in Sudan as a result of its ongoing devastating internal conflict.Wheat stem rust race characterization in a greenhouse at KALRO-Njoro. Credit: Sridhar Bhavani (CIMMYT) WP5: Methods for Inclusive and Equitable Scaling for Achieving Impacts Q On track Output 1. Robust tools and analy�cal methods on field-level needs assessment.target countries for deploying gender-equitable and socially inclusive plant health innova�ons.Gender-and genera�on-specific constraints and aspira�ons, and farmers & societal orientated need related to plant health are iden�fied.3. An interdisciplinary research tool developed to assess knowledge gaps in detec�on by farmers/plant doctors for improved diagnos�c and surveillance.Equitable, inclusive, and cost-effec�ve methods used in four targeted countries to promote adop�on of plant health innova�ons.Policy-relevant evidence based on casual impact evalua�on that considers equity, cost effec�veness, and ecological aspects.Researchers in five target countries use needs assessment evidence and data to develop demand-driven equitable IPDM technologies.Stakeholders in 10 selected LMICs adopt par�cipatory approaches for problem iden�fica�on to develop scalable and equitable IDPM technologies.Women and young farmers in at least 6 targeted countries acquire new knowledge and skills on IPD in targeted countries.Na�onal partners, funders and policy makers in four targeted LMICs have improved access to informa�on on effec�veness of plant health innova�ons.Stakeholders including women and young scien�sts in six targeted LMICs u�lize improved capacity and skills to combat P&D and scale plant health innova�ons.Plant health research community in at least six targeted LMICs uses needs assessment evidence and data to develop demand-driven, equitable and scalable IPDM & IMM innova�ons.Na�onal and regional partners in at least six LMICs u�lize validated scaling approaches for P&D detec�on and surveillance, IPDM and IMM.Based on science-based Plant Health Policy Briefs, investors and decision makers in targeted regions create an enabling environment for R4D and scaling of plant health innova�ons.Work Package 5 progress against the theory of change PHI-WP5 focuses on gender equality, social inclusion, and impact assessment, in close interface with other Work Packages. In 2023, WP5 addressed gender and social inclusion by developing interdisciplinary research tools and methods collectively through a Global Research Network on Gender and Plant Health (WP5-OP1 & OP3). Seven CGIAR Centers have conducted studies to identify gender gaps and gender-based constraints in the following three themes: 1) pest and disease identification; 2) adoption of digital tools; and 3) extension and training approaches (WP5-OP2). The insights from these studies helped technology developers to improve the design of digital decision-support tools, such as Tumaini and potato late blight handheld decision-support tool (WP5-OP4), and provided recommendations toward gender-responsive training methods for women.Regarding impact assessment, during 2023, a) 2121 households were surveyed in an RCT to analyze adoption of Aflasafe among smallscale farmers in Nigeria; b) baseline data from 1200 households were collected and analyzed in an RCT investigating gender-responsive adoption of Push-Pull Technology (PPT) among maize producers in Uganda for Fall Armyworm (FAW) management. With the results from the two RCTs to be used to provide evidence-based policy recommendations on equitable scaling of PHI innovations and the impacts of scaling (WP5-OP5 & OP6); and c) a phone survey of 398 farmers in 57 communities in Kenya was organized to assess the current levels of FAW and MLN, farmers' awareness and practice of control options, and use of extension and mobile phones for accessing information. This study provides needs assessments by gender and the baseline P&D situation of plant health innovations in Kenya and contributes to equitable scaling and impact assessment (WP5-OP5 & OP6).The provided text outlines the progress and achievements of WP1 during 2023, highlighting its focus on bridging knowledge gaps and establishing networks for plant health threat identification across multiple countries, as well as collaboration with various organizations. Significant progress was made across the three major outputs (OP2, OP3, and OP4). However, budget reductions since the initiation of the Initiative necessitated scaling back certain activities, particularly those related to surveillance and the organization of additional training sessions. As a result, adjustments were made to the total number of target countries and institutions in the initially defined End of Initiative outcomes 1 and 2.The PHI-WP2 team has managed to fulfill its commitments for 2023 despite a reduction in funding mid-year. The team focused on innovation development, which involved creating, improving, and validating tools and models to predict shifts in P&D. Capacity sharing for developmentOther outputs 1 88 72 41Not targeted: The result did not target any of the Impact Area objec�ves.The result has made a significant contribu�on to any of the Impact Area objec�ves, even though the objec�ve(s) is not the principal focus of the result.The result is principally about mee�ng any of the Impact Area objec�ves, and this is fundamental in its design and expected results. The result would not have been undertaken without this objec�ve. Innovations by readiness levelThe innova�on is validated for its ability to achieve a specific impact under uncontrolled condi�onsThe innova�on is being tested for its ability to achieve a specific impact under uncontrolled condi�onsThe innova�on is validated for its ability to achieve a specific impact under semi-controlled condi�onsThe innova�on is being tested for its ability to achieve a specific impact under semi-controlled condi�onsThe innova�on is validated for its ability to achieve a specific impact under fully-controlled condi�onsThe innova�on is being tested for its ability to achieve a specific impact under fully-controlled condi�onsThe innova�on's key concepts have been validated for their ability to achieve a specific impactThe innova�on's key concepts are being formulated or designedThe innova�on's basic principles are being researched for their ability to achieve a specific impactThe innova�on is at idea stage Data here represents an overview of reported results in 2022 and 2023. One result can impact multiple countries and can therefore be represented multiple times.75 results with a global focus Partnerships and Plant Health's impact pathwaysIn 2023, the PHI team collaborated with a total of 180 non-CGIAR partners across 58 countries, including international agricultural research centers (e.g., CABI, icipe, World Vegetable Center), NARES institutions, NPPOs, universities, governmental organizations, private companies, and NGOs, among others. All these partners contributed to the implementation of various activities under the PHI Work Packages.Out of 180 non-CGIAR partners, 90 organizations were demand partners from 45 countries, 108 were innovation partners from 47 countries, and 82 were scaling partners. Some partners played more than one role. Some partners are involved in ongoing efforts through bilateral projects, which PHI is leveraging to extend, adopt, and scale plant health innovations in the global South.Sixty-five partners contributed to WP1, primarily focusing on the development and validation of molecular and image-based AI detection tools for characterizing, monitoring and surveilling targeted P&Ds and operating the regional diagnostic and surveillance network. In • A PHI-CIP team received complementary funding from USAID-IL-CETC for potato pest and disease management in Honduras, Guatemala, and Kenya, and from CABANAnet (Capacity Building for Bioinformatics in Latin America), funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, for plant pathogen identification and population analysis in potato and sweet potato.• Projects funded by the French Development Agency for implementation in Sudan, the Royal Government of Norway for implementation in Mali and Niger, the Agricultural Business Initiative (aBi) for implementation in Uganda, the World Bank for implementation in DR Congo and Burundi, GRUMA for implementation in Mexico, and USDA-FAS for implementation in Mali have been pivotal in complementing PHI-WP4 activities and expanding the reach and impact of mycotoxin management efforts.A PHI-WP5 team in CIP, AfricaRice, and Bioversity received complementary funding support (US$ ~50K) from the CGIAR Gender Impact Platform in 2023 to implement case studies and a regional workshop in Africa.Section 7: Adaptive managementFocus on a set of prioritized, high-impact objectives under each Work Package, especially: (i) innovations already in the pipeline (stages 1 to 4) to advance product development along the Scaling Readiness pathway (stages 5 to 7), (ii) scale-up validated innovations to increase adoption by the farmers; and (iii) generate more useful \"knowledge products\" relevant for different types of stakeholders (researchers, farmers, policy makers).In the final year of this Phase 1 of the Initiatives, we should prioritize further development and scaling of innovations already reported in prior years to ensure maximum impact of the investments in these. We should also focus on the development of knowledge products that are highly relevant and applicable to diverse stakeholders.Promote more integration among scientists working on different crops and different CGIAR Centers and partner institutions to work together for effective plant health management with a landscape/ agroecology perspective.Smallholders normally grow different crops with different phytosanitary problems that require integrated solutions. We may need to change the way Initiatives are funded and allocate mandatory budgets for multi-Center, multi-Initiative activities to promote dynamic interactions among the CGIAR Centers and partners to develop/validate/deploy multiinstitutional and transdisciplinary innovations.Improve cohesion among diverse practitioners across institutions globally working on P&D data management and risk modelling for cross-learning and development of integrated tools useful for multiple P&Ds and regions.The PHI-WP2 team across CGIAR Centers have been working independently on different P&D cases using different models for P&D risk prediction. Strengthening the community of practice on P&D data management and risk modelling will help improve cohesion, cross-learning, and adoption of standard approaches for P&D risk prediction and management.Develop risk mitigation and contingency plans for newly emerging P&Ds identified based on risk models developed under the Plant Health Initiative.The PHI-WP2 team has developed tools and models to identify predisposing factors and to predict P&D emergence. These will be handy in preparing P&D outbreak mitigation and contingency plans for newly emerging threats to guide control measures in the targeted LMICs in the global South.PHI may further prioritize research areas to align with the budget and identify opportunities to leverage bilateral projects. Budget allocation for CGIAR and non-CGIAR partners would need to be revisited if the trend of budget reduction for PHI continues. Our artners require additional budget allocations, but it is not possible to meet their needs unless the Initiative budget grows.Continuous budget cuts since the start of PHI in January 2022 have forced us to cut several important activities demanded by our stakeholders. Also, due to the financial calendar of the Initiative, subgrant funds to non-CGIAR partners are typically distributed only in the second quarter of the year, which does not align well with the crop calendars in many regions. And because there will be a reorganization of the CGIAR Research Portfolio to 2025, with the Initiatives (in their present form) closing by 31 December 2024, all the subgrant activities must be closed by this year end. These two facts mean that there is a shorter implementation period for the subgrantees than in the previous two years, and that fewer subgrantees will be able to deliver in the given period due to local crop calendars.In 2023, PHI's WP2 team honed data-driven tools to combat rapidspreading P&Ds in both perennial and annual cropping systems. Utilizing cutting-edge data processing, remote sensing, machine learning, and AI, these efforts enable tools and procedures for early detection, mapping, and monitoring of crop infestations, averting large-scale outbreaks. The TUMAINI Banana Disease Dashboard, alongside advancements in wheat rust monitoring, climate modeling, and pathogen genomic surveillance strengthens plant health biosecurity policies against economically significant P&Ds in LMICs.In 2023, the PHI WP2 team on \"Risk Assessment, Data Management, and Guiding Preparedness for Rapid Response\" enhanced datadriven decision-support tools to combat invasive pests and diseases (P&Ds) with potential to spread rapidly and significantly disrupt agricultural production and farmer livelihoods. The team successfully leveraged past advancements and integrated novel innovations to track P&Ds within both perennial and annual cropping systems. A few achievements are highlighted here.Predictive tools for managing disease in banana farming:Addressing invasive diseases such as banana bunchy top disease (BBTD), fusarium wilt, and bacterial wilt, a collaborative effort by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, IITA, and their partners generated significant innovations. A TUMAINI Banana Disease Dashboard 1 leverages a decade's worth of surveillance data (50,000 GPS points catalogued across 15 countries) and data analytics to visualize and track patterns in the spread of banana P&D. Additionally, remote sensing and AI transformed banana-mapping 2 within African mixed farming systems. Utilizing data obtained from synthetic aperture radar, unmanned aerial vehicle imagery (45,000 images), and ground-truthing with GoPro cameras (150,000 images), the team developed AI models with an 80 percent accuracy rate in predicting banana areas, and enhancing disease risk modelling and surveillance decision-making. A custom-trained Yolo-v8 AI model was developed to conduct surveys of banana fields using unmanned aerial vehicles that distinguish healthy and infected plants 3 . Logistic regression techniques were employed to determine environmental conditions conducive to BBTD spread across the African landscape, bolstering landscape surveillance and decision support 4 .Innovations in monitoring P&Ds in an annual cropping system -the case of wheat: Collaborating with partners, the PHI team at CIMMYT utilized cutting-edge sensor technologies to map and monitor rust occurrences in wheat. Leveraging unmanned aerial vehicles and ultra-high-resolution satellite sensors, the team monitored wheat rust in on-station and on-farm experiments and identified 18 spectral features as predictors of rust diseases and yield impact 5 . Using Random Forest AI models and Sentinel-2 satellite data, high-resolution static and dynamic wheat distribution maps were generated, enhancing forecasting models for rust vulnerability in Ethiopia 6 . In tandem with remote surveillance efforts, Yellow Rust Resistance Monitoring Network sites were established for tracking the evolution of resistant-breaking strains and evaluating the performance of newly bred wheat varieties against existing strains. The data collected facilitate informed breeding decisions that support development of more resilient wheat cultivars 7 .Other advancements have fortified predictive modelling capabilities centered on harnessing biophysical data. These include release of an enhanced insect life cycle modelling web platform to elucidate climate change effects on insect pest outbreaks 8 . Additionally, an upgraded EPIRICE model has been devised to forecast the impacts of weather factors on rice blast and rice brown spot dynamics across Africa and Asia 9, 10 . Another module, integrated into the NextStrain web, facilitates tracking cassava geminiviruses in Southeast Asia and cassava potexviruses in LAC 11 . A simulation model blending African armyworm bioecology with AI algorithms was developed to predict and prepare for pest outbreaks 12 . In addition, with text mining and AI technologies, we created a global media analysis tool for tracking reports of P&D occurrences 13 .We also employed genomic surveillance to gauge the influence of pathogen genetic diversity on crop disease control. This work investigated viruses afflicting chickpea and lentil in Ethiopia, faba bean in Tunisia 14 , yam mosaic virus in Nigeria 15 , rice yellow mottle virus in Nigeria 16 , toradovirus in potato associated with rugose symptoms in Peru 17 , and post-flowering stalk rot pathogens in South Asia (9,265).These innovations from the multidisciplinary approach of WP2 contribute to the country's preparedness to counter economically important P&Ds and augment plant health biosecurity policies.Annexure 1: Additional Key Result Stories from PHI in 2023 NOTE: In addition to the Key Result Story reported above on \"Data-driven smart tools for countering emerging crop pests and diseases in Africa, Asia, and Latin America\" under PHI-WP2, the PHI team's efforts have led to four additional Key Result Stories emanating from the work done with partners globally in 2023 under WP1, WP3, WP4, and WP5. These can be accessed through the hyperlinks below.Tools for detection, monitoring, and surveillance of crop pests and diseasesInnovations for integrated management of major crop pests and diseases in the Global SouthFostering public-private collaboration for scaling mycotoxin mitigation tools in Africa and the AmericasGender and Plant Health Global Research Network tackling gender barriers in technology development, adoption, and scalingA lead farmer explaining integrated virus and vector management on faba bean at the Plant Health Innovation Platform in Lebanon.Credit: Safaa Kumari (ICARDA)Wheat yellow rust sample collection by KALRO Pathology Team. Credit: Eric Githinji (KALRO)","tokenCount":"6545"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"abc06a8db2ffb010aa4bc078cbedb3e2","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/8fc51064-b8fb-45f1-9087-7f19ba7dffb7/retrieve","id":"-1956302778"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"62cc41f2-c6a7-449e-b7a3-d32361969fa4","pagecount":"2","content":"Intensification of food production is urgently needed for the burgeoning populations of the East and Central African highlands. Potato is a smalholder cash crop in these areas and has great potential to raise livelihoods while reducing poverty and improving food and nutrition security. With a yield potential of 51,603 kilocalories per hectare per day in a short growing season (90-120 days), potato's productivity in terms of energy is the highest of all major arable crops, almost double that of rice and wheat, and also has high protein production (1.4 kg/ha per day).In general, potato is well suited to places where land is limited and labor abundant-a characteristic of many of many poor and developing countries. Potato's short and highly flexible vegetative cycle fits well with the double-cropping season in the East African highlands. In rainfed systems, potato is one of the first crops that can be harvested after the onset of the rainy season, thus enabling an important 'hunger-break' before grains can be harvested.However, climate change is threatening to potato production systems in East Africa through increasing exposure to extreme weather conditions, primarily floods and droughts. In many of the drier potato-growing regions, water and heat stress are leading to declining yields. Where there is no possibility of irrigation, yields will decrease even further. In the tropics and subtropics, yields are expected to decline by 20-30%. Even in traditional potatogrowing areas between 1,500 and 3,500 meters, increasing temperatures and periodic droughts have been observed over the last decade. The rapidly increasing population in the highlands is reducing available land, forcing farmers to migrate to the lower, warmer and drier areas.To adapt potato to these challenges, breeders and researchers from the International Potato Center (CIP) are prioritizing their breeding and selection strategies on resilience to identify the most likely varieties to resist climate-induced stressors. CIP has selected a set of robust potato germplasm with traits such as heat tolerance, earliness-to-ripen, virus and late blight resistance, and good water-use efficiency, among others. These germplasm were selected by support from the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture (SFSA) project 'Evaluation and selection of heat and drought tolerance of CIP potato germplasm ' (2014-2016). In nontraditional potato growing areas, at altitudes below 1,800 meters, and with average growing-season precipitation of 200-400 mm, most of the 37 candidate varieties (CIP clones) yielded more than 10% above mean yields of registered varieties, and six yielded more than 25% above-an extremely high-performance advantage. After national performance trials in Kenya, two of the six varieties were registered in 2016 and four in 2017.The project will meet its goal of disseminating the heartiest and consumer-demanded potato varieties by fulfilling the following objectives:• To identify the two or three most commercially viable varieties of the six released;Starting with six already released potato varieties, this project will identify the two or three most commercially viable and promote a seed system for these varieties to address the food needs of the burgeoning population.• To create awareness of and demand for these varieties through market release;• To establish a seed system in which registered seed multipliers have access to newly released varieties to increase certified seed production, and decentralized multipliers receive early generation seed to multiply locally; and• To identify and facilitate the release of additional varieties with commercial potential.With a view to identifying the two or three best performing varieties, CIP will thoroughly evaluate the six varieties already released in terms of seed multiplication efficiency to determine per unit costs and farmer demand. This work will include determining multiplication rates at each stage of production and consequently the total cost of production of certified seed. CIP will simultaneously collect basic agronomic data and look at resistance to diseases such as potato cyst nematode, tolerance to heat, and late blight and bacterial wilt. The most popular local varieties will be used as controls.To determine demand, 250 tubers of 3-5 varieties will be distributed to at least 1,000 farmers, who will provide performance feedback via an SMS questionnaire. New varieties will also be promoted at agricultural shows and distributed to other potato projects and government initiatives.To further create awareness and demand for the new varieties, farmer groups will receive 50 kg of the varieties for distribution among their members, along with instructions on bulking, information about the varieties, and contact information of the seed producers. The project will ensure that clean seed is available at field days and in non-traditional potato-growing regions. New varieties will be included in the National Potato Council of Kenya potato variety catalogue. The project will produce promotional material, including agronomic and organoleptic information on the varieties and will be distributed with the seed bags and at agricultural fairs.CIP will work with three registered seed merchants with which it has already established a working relationship to multiply seed from 'starter' materials (e.g., in-vitro plantlets, mini-tubers, rooted apical cuttings). Starter materials will also be shared with the national potato program, the parastatal Agricultural Development Cooperation, and new potato seed multipliers.An additional 12 CIP clones are being evaluated within the mid-altitude national performance trials. These varieties will be assessed critically to identify one or two varieties with the highest commercial potential at each site.CIP has previously trained over 1,000 decentralized seed multipliers. This network will disseminate new varieties to over 10,000 farm households. If these farmers sell or share 10% of their harvest for others to use as seed, more than 15,000 farmers will be reached. ","tokenCount":"903"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"1eaa9e2d9b100bed40f567bf83bc4efa","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/2ae31b45-48e8-4089-aba8-b6271970c9e7/retrieve","id":"-1156131904"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"27feb9f1-643d-457e-b0e3-317504d2234f","pagecount":"1","content":"El proyecto de Ontología de Cultivos ha sido identificado como una iniciativa del \"Generation Challenge Program\" (GCP), liderado por \"Bioversity International\" y ejecutado por el Centro Internacional de la Papa (CIP), como una herramienta fundamental para la gestión y análisis de la información relacionada con los cultivos. En los últimos años en la agricultura se ha notado un incremento en las terminologías relacionadas con el fenotipo, germoplasma, pedigrí entre otros, generando una demanda de crear vocabularios controlados y ontologías que permitan el fácil intercambio de información entre diferentes entidades. Esto permitirá que la aplicación de técnicas de minería de datos numéricos pueda ser aplicada para ayudar a descubrir correlaciones previamente desconocidas. En el CIP se está desarrollando las ontologías de papa como parte de un esfuerzo de la comunidad científica.Las Ontologías para morfología en papa se basaron en descriptores morfológicos desarrollados para papas nativas y silvestres [3,4], así como en evaluaciones de materiales estandarizados [2]. También se consideró los rasgos relevantes que los mejoradores utilizaron en la generación de catálogos por el Centro Internacional de la Papa [5]. Asimismo esta información se analizó con la lista de características de los descriptores de las variedades de papa [7]. Y se realizaron comparaciones de diferentes ontologías disponibles en la web de la comunidad de \"Ontologías de cultivos\" para solanácea, yuca, haba y maíz [6].La ontología de la papa incluye 73 rasgos: se incluyen descriptores morfológicos (41), agronómicos (6), de resistencia (7), bioquímicos (7), reacción al estrés abiótico (2), características fenológicas (1) y pos-cosecha (9). En las ontologías de papa se menciona 41 descriptores morfológicos los cuales se agrupan dentro de seis subgrupos, características de plantas (1), inflorescencia (12), características de hojas (11), de tallo (2), tubérculos (11), brotes (3) y molecular (1). Dentro de las características de planta tenemos el hábito de crecimiento de la planta que se relaciona con hábito de planta (solanáceas-SP000003). En tubérculo, color predominante de la piel con superficie del color de la raíz (Yuca-CO_334:0000053) y color de grano (maíz-CO_322:0000205). En los descriptores nutricionales Vitamina C se relaciona con yuca CO_334:0000065, ácido cítrico en solanáceas (SP: 0000166).La construcción de una ontología, especifica, formaliza un aspecto crucial del trabajo terminográfico. Sin embargo se debe considerar los beneficios de este trabajo: obtener un conocimiento más profundo del dominio de datos relacionados a varios cultivos, además por supuesto de la disponibilidad de un recurso valioso con unas posibilidades de reutilización muy grandes en campos muy diversos.La ontología esta accesible en:http://www.cropontology.org/ ontology/CO_330/Potato","tokenCount":"410"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"3a7547f3760085854951101a77041632","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/1221a74d-1a8e-4274-954d-3de0764e8625/retrieve","id":"-405763206"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"d1109b0f-5ab2-4250-a3b3-89f2c58fec65","pagecount":"8","content":"Achieving and maintaining global food security is challenged by changes in population, income, and climate, among other drivers. Assessing these threats and weighing possible solutions requires a robust multidisciplinary approach. One such approach integrates biophysical modeling with economic modeling to explore the combined effects of climate stresses and future socioeconomic trends, thus providing a more accurate picture of how agriculture and the food system may be affected in the coming decades. We review and analyze the literature on this structural approach and present a case study that follows this methodology, explicitly modeling drought and heat tolerant crop varieties. We show that yield gains from adoption of these varieties differ by technology and region, but are generally comparable in scale to (and thus able to offset) adverse effects of climate change. However, yield increases over the projection period are dominated by the effects of growth in population, income, and general productivity, highlighting the importance of joint assessment of biophysical and socioeconomic drivers to better understand climate impacts and responses.Achieving food security is challenged by changes in population, income, and climate, among other factors. Challenges in the agricultural sector include increasing demand and competition for natural resources as well as biotic and abiotic stresses. Geographic and temporal variability add complexity. These issues are being increasingly studied using a combination of tools and methodologies, some relying on purely biophysical approaches through process-based, agro-ecosystem, or statistical models, and others estimating the economic effects resulting from changes in productivity. The so-called \"structural approach\" (Fernández and Blanco, 2015) relies on the combination of biophysical and economic models and has been increasingly used and developed in recent years.A combined, structural approach provides a flexible, scenariobased framework which can offer a more complete understanding of the complex and diverse impacts of climate change on agriculture and food security. In the face of potential future changes, such an approach can inform better investment decisions by estimating gains from adoption measures. Studies based on this approach have showed that, from a purely biophysical standpoint, climate change effects by 2050 could reduce global maize, rice and wheat yields by as much as 25% compared to a no-climate-change (no CC) baseline before economic adjustments are considered (Rosegrant et al. 2014). Market effects moderate the impacts of climate change through price mechanisms. When changes in prices and global trade are included, yields of major crops (coarse grains, rice, wheat, oilseeds, and sugar) in 2050 are instead projected to be 11% lower compared to a scenario of perfect mitigation in the same year (Nelson et al., 2014b). These studies also showed that-in response to drivers such as population, income, and climate-commodity prices are expected to increase significantly over time, even accounting for the development of new technologies. The flexibility of the structural approach in linking climate and crop models together with socioeconomic analysis also has the potential to open up new research areas and avenues for collaboration. Use of the structural approach can contribute to Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/gfs better targeting and prioritization of plant breeding, which represents a large share of the investments by national and international agricultural research institutions.In this paper, we provide a brief overview of the principal components of the structural approach, how they are represented in the literature, and what they offer to research on climate change impacts on crop yields and food production. We then show how recent work by the CGIAR adds to the body of research, answers some of the questions raised in previous studies, and fills some of the gaps highlighted by other authors.The issue of how climate change may affect agricultural productivity and food security has been addressed using a range of tools. Although the general research question may be the same, each tool takes a specific angle and therefore generates an answer that is informed, and limited, by the scope and power of the chosen methodology. Many of the tools and methods can also be combined in a structural approach (Fig. 1) using both soft and hard links between models and data (Reilly and Willenbockel, 2010). There are three major components of this approach: 1) physiological studies, 2) crop models, and 3) economic models. Each component can stand on its own and represents an important body of research, but the components can also be linked together to present a more complete picture. Physiological research addresses how changes in weather (e.g. temperature and precipitation) and other factors affect crops. Crop modeling work simulates how yields change under different conditions, whether using historical data or future projections. Economic studies examine how yields change when market interactions are considered and how this affects prices, production, consumption, and trade. Each component of the research is influenced by other factors such as climate stress (precipitation, temperature, availability of water, among others) based on General Circulation Model (GCM) results. They may include information on specific technologies, such as drought and heat tolerance, as we do here.Much research focuses on the physiological traits that influence how climate stresses affect plants. Water shortages and increased temperatures are key constraints to agricultural productivity. Therefore, development of drought and heat tolerant cultivars is of utmost importance to maintain yields (Barnabás et al., 2008), and we focus on the literature that addresses these traits. This research mainly covers how planting dates, fertilizer regimes, water limitations, and changes in temperature affect particular plants (Araus et al., 2008, Barnabás et al., 2008). These studies generally find that under plausible future climate change scenarios and holding other factors such as crop varieties and management practices constant, we are likely to see decreased yields for many crops (Campos et al., 2004). Yield maintenance is therefore of paramount importance in developing drought and heat resistant cultivars (Barnabás et al., 2008). Stresses during different developmental stages of the plant influence the level of yield decline. For example, heat stress during germination can slow or in some cases totally inhibit the process and lead to crop failure (Wahid et al., 2007). Crop physiology improves our understanding of the interlinked determinants of crop yield and the combined plant response can consequently improve crop simulation models (Araus, 2008).Crop models are the second component of the structural methodology. They can be divided into two types: crop simulation models that are process-based and statistical models that are reduced form. Process-based models specify agents and their behavior in dynamic systems to estimate the effects of counterfactual changes (Chetty, 2009;Sims, 1986) and can take non-linearities into account (Olmstead, 2009). On the other hand, reduced form models describe relationships among selected variables while holding others constant and estimate statistical relationships. Process-based models require a large amount of data to calibrate and validate, and as such, reduced form models are useful alternatives in data-sparse environments (Chetty, 2009).A handful of models make up the majority of crop simulation work to date, including process-based models such as the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) model (Hoogenboom et al., 2012;Jones et al., 2003), the Agricultural Production Systems Simulator Model (APSIM) (Keating et al., 2003), and the Global Agro-Ecological Zone (AEZ) modeling framework (Fischer et al., 2002(Fischer et al., , 2005)). The Lund-Potsdam-Jena managed Land (LPJmL) model (Bondeau et al., 2007) has also been used in more recent work (Blanco et al., 2014;Frank et al., 2014) along with DSSAT, EPIC, pDSSAT, PEGASUS (Nelson et al., 2014a(Nelson et al., , 2014b;;von Lampe et al., 2014;Wiebe et al., 2015), and the General Large Area Model (GLAM) for annual crops (Challinor et al., 2010). Crop modeling focuses on the biophysical dimensions of climate change effects on future crop yields and how adaptation strategies may be used to minimize negative outcomes. These studies tend to focus on yield effects for maize because data for maize has the most extensive and detailed coverage. It is also an important food and feed crop globally. Other crops studies include beans in East Africa (Thornton et al., 2010), sorghum in Tanzania, India, and Mali (Msongaleli, 2015), wheat in China (Challinor et al., 2010), groundnuts in India and West Africa (Singh et al., 2014b), and chickpea in South Asia and East Africa (Singh et al., 2014a).Reduced form statistical analyses use historical and field trial data to estimate relationships between yield and climate variables which are then used to project yields into the future under various GCMs. For example, Lobell et al. (2008) modeled 94 crops worldwide using historical harvest data, while Schlenker and Lobell (2010) modeled maize, sorghum, millet, groundnuts, and cassava in Sub-Saharan Africa. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and its partners conduct yearly field trials to assess the performance of improved maize varieties in eastern and southern Africa (Bänziger et al., 2006, Lobell et al., 2011). The data from these trials have been used in a regressionbased approach to estimate the effects of changes in rainfall and temperature (Lobell et al., 2011).Process-based and statistical approaches often rely on a large set of projected climate change effects from various GCMs that take into account temperature, precipitation, water stresses, and other variables. The studies range from using a single, representative GCM (Jones and Thornton, 2003) to 21 GCMs (Cooper et al., 2008). The Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fourth assessment report (AR4) is the common source for GCM climate change projections for many of the studies that were done prior to the release of AR5. Many studies use two SRES emissions pathways which cover a broad spectrum of effects from different temperature and rainfall patterns (Ciscar et al., 2009;Thornton et al., 2010;Nelson et al., 2010;Ciscar et al., 2011;Calzadilla et al., 2013). In more recent work using the IPCC AR5 report, Msongaleli et al. (2015) modeled maize and sorghum in Tanzania under two representative concentration pathways (RCPs), 8.5 and 4.5, and Wiebe et al. (2015)  used RCP 4.5, 6.0, and 8.5. A greater number of combinations of GCMs and RCPs/SRES scenarios enables a wider range of plausible futures for analysis, however, it is not always possible to run every combination due to computing power and data requirements of the crop models. The spectrum of positive and negative effects is sometimes modeled using a no climate change baseline along with an extreme climate change scenario such as RCP 8.5.The final component of the structural methodology pictured in Fig. 1 is economic modeling. Partial equilibrium (PE) models of the agricultural sector and computable general equilibrium (CGE) models have been used to estimate the impacts of climate change on crop productivity. These models help in understanding the market effects of crop production and its response to climate change. This can be done in a stylized manner where climate change is incorporated into the crop yield response in economic models (Lobell et al., 2013). Hertel et al. (2010) and Calzadilla et al. (2013) measure the effects of climate change in the GTAP and GTAP-W economic models, respectively, with exogenous yield shocks by region obtained from the crop modeling literature. These models use historical data for calibration and validation, but the focus is on future responses to climate change.Linking biophysical models (along with climate models) and socioeconomic analysis allows for a potentially deeper and broader understanding of future climate change impacts and how to plan for them (Challinor et al., 2010). Adding the socioeconomic component to crop modeling allows accounting for the response of global markets to climate shocks, providing a more complete representation of the response of the larger food system. Macroeconomic scenarios of population and income growth for many structural modeling approaches often rely on the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) developed for the IPCC AR5 (O'Neill et al., 2014). The SSPs are coherent scenarios of macroeconomic drivers that give plausible projections to 2100. They have been used as a common source for socioeconomic drivers under the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) (Nelson et al., 2014a;von Lampe et al., 2014;Wiebe et al., 2015).The first studies using the structural approach were limited by data, computing power, downscaling techniques, and level of commodity and regional disaggregation, among other critical elements (Fernández and Blanco, 2015). Earlier studies use the IPCC AR4 SRES scenarios for the socioeconomic projections while some research uses the UN median population and World Bank income growth projections as their business-as-usual scenario (Nelson et al., 2014a;Rosegrant et al., 2014). The number of climate change scenarios modeled ranges from two (Parry et al., 1999) to fourteen (Fischer et al., 2005). Studies also vary in their regional scope, with some covering five regions in Europe (Ciscar et al., 2009;Ciscar et. al., 2011) or focusing on European countries only (Shrestha et al., 2013), while others cover as many as 159 countries (Wiebe et al., 2015;Ignaciuk et al., 2015;Springmann et al., 2016). The time horizon for the studies also varies, most going to 2050 or 2080 with some intermediate results provided for 2020 and 2030. Crop simulation modeling serves as an intermediate step in the structural approach (Nelson et al., 2010;Nelson et al., 2014a;Wiebe et al., 2015). Although crop simulation modeling might use historical climate data for calibration, the results generated are for future time periods.Research conducted under AgMIP by Nelson et al. (2014aNelson et al. ( , 2014b) ) and von Lampe et al. (2014), harmonized input data and provided results from five CGE and four PE models. These studies are also cutting edge in that they used outputs from a variety of crop models and harmonized their results to use as inputs into the economic models (under a high emissions pathway). This allowed for more direct comparison of the results to highlight how production and food security may be affected by climate change from various perspectives. Further analysis compared the impacts of climate change on yields, production, area, prices, and trade across multiple socioeconomic and emissions pathways (Wiebe et al., 2015).The studies that use the structural approach find that the addition of economic modeling decreases the yield changes that result from purely biophysical modeling through economic feedback mechanisms in production and consumption (Blanco et al., 2014;Nelson et al., 2010). Globally aggregated results from these economic analyses show that the world is producing enough food to feed the growing population currently, and moving into the future (Witzke et al., 2014). However, regional differences in production are likely to be exacerbated due to climate change and differences in impacts and adaptive capacity are expected to create a growing wedge between developed and developing countries (Parry et al., 1999;Parry et al., 2004;Tesfaye et al., 2015).Given the complexity of climate impacts on crop yields and food production, there is an increasing need to link biophysical and economic methods and results. Considerable work has explored the impact of climate change on yields under alternative socioeconomic and climate pathways. However, not as much work has used this methodology to simulate the potential effects of new crop technologies as a means of adapting to climate change. Different authors have signaled the need for improvements along the chain of the structural approach, from greater efforts in representing the effects of adaptation policies and strategies (Fernández and Blanco, 2015), or, more specifically, in properly translating results from field trials into crop modeling so that biophysical models can effectively simulate the improved traits that are currently sought by agronomists (Challinor et al., 2010). Only a couple of studies so far, e.g. Rosegrant et al. (2014) and Nedumaran et al. (2014), actually model explicit adaptation technologies in an economic modeling framework.Significant progress has been made in implementing structural approaches for evaluating technology adoption in agriculture. Building on the method published by Nelson et al. (2009), researchers at IFPRI simulated the productivity and food security effects from the expanded adoption of several agricultural technologies and practices considered representative of a sustainable intensification approach (Rosegrant et al., 2014). The study by Rosegrant et al. (2014) is global and regional in scope and relies on scenarios in which technologies are adopted globally in wheat, maize, and rice producing areas. For the case study highlighted in this section, we followed the approach of Rosegrant et al. (2014) by estimating the productivity effects of improved crop varieties focused on specific regions, but with more nuanced scenarios of adoption informed by a collaboration between several CGIAR centers as part of the Global Futures and Strategic Foresight (GFSF) program. The improvements represented by crop varieties are represented as additive gains on top of the exogenous baseline assumptions on yield growth.The IMPACT system of models (Fig. 2) links general circulation models (GCMs), crop simulation models, water models, and a global economic model in the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT, Robinson et al., 2015a). We used the IMPACT system of models to run alternative scenarios for drought and heat tolerant crop varieties under two extreme future climate scenarios. Detailed, locationspecific data on climate, soil type, and physiological crop parameters are incorporated into the DSSAT crop models. Climate and technology-induced yield shocks from crop models are used as inputs into IMPACT, a partial equilibrium, multi-market, agricultural sector economic model. In addition, plausible regions of adoption and rates of adoption (maximum rates and timelines) of new technologies by farmers are solicited through center expertise and then modeled in IMPACT following logistic adoption curves (Table 1). Long-run drivers such as population and income growth (as represented in SSP2) are also used as inputs in the economic model.The structural approach is formalized in the design of the IM-PACT system of models. Importantly, the link between physiological/biological studies and crop models is made explicit in this system. Collecting data from several cropping systems (maize, wheat, potatoes, groundnuts, and sorghum), GFSF team members in three participating CGIAR centers (CIMMYT, CIP, and ICRISAT) identified specific drought and heat tolerance (DT and HT) traits as priorities for addressing climate challenges.The climate and economic scenarios used in IMPACT draw on the work developed for the IPCC AR5 report. We analyze the effect on agricultural productivity from adoption of DT and HT improved varieties under a no climate change (NoCC) and a climate change (CC) scenario that is expected to cause significant changes to agricultural systems worldwide. Under the NoCC scenario the alternative technologies perform better than the baseline technology. However, to really test the benefits of the technologies a more extreme climate scenario is used. This extreme climate scenario was simulated using the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory's Earth System Model (GFDL ESM2M) using RCP 8.5. This CC scenario is driest, on average across the globe and was chosen specifically to test the performance of drought tolerant varieties under conditions where the technology would be expected to be more beneficial.Results from the IMPACT model show that improved drought and heat tolerant crop varieties have the potential to reduce the negative yield impacts from climate change. In IMPACT, yield growth over time is comprised of exogenous and endogenous effects. In our approach, climate change is treated as an independent factor that affects yield growth due to changes in precipitation and temperature; generally in RCP 8.5 climate scenarios this effect reduces crop productivity across most regions. The exception is crop production in more northern latitudes where longer and warmer growing seasons may improve yields. This can be seen with wheat, where global average yields increase due to climate change with large regional variability. The exogenous yields calculated within the IMPACT system of models are affected by climate change, water availability, and assumptions of growth implicit in the core economic model, but they are independent of market effects. When market effects are also taken into consideration, prices and trade interact with agricultural productivity worldwide, producing what are defined as endogenous yields (Robinson et al., 2015a). Market effects dampen both negative and positive impacts on yields because the price signals from changing yields influence incentives to adjust farm management.In this study, we found that the technologies tested in many of the regions were able to partially or completely offset the negative effects of climate change on yields. For example, looking at exogenous yields, we estimate that climate change may decrease yields of rainfed maize by 6% in twelve African countries (see Table 1) with baseline technology compared to a scenario without CC (Fig. 3). In contrast, the modeled adoption of a drought tolerant maize variety under CC conditions increases yields by about 25% compared to a reference scenario with CC but without adoption of this variety.  Note: Final adoption rates for potatoes, sorghum, and groundnuts vary by country. The final adoption refers to the share of crop area that adopts the alternative technology.Increased production lowers prices, ceteris paribus. Price changes affect both consumer and producer behavior, with consumers increasing consumption and producers decreasing production. In IMPACT, producers respond to changing commodity price by adjusting land allocation (extensive response) and/or input levels (intensive response). In this exercise, the intensive response to lower prices dominates for all crops except sorghum, with farmers achieving smaller yield gains than suggested by the crop models. Generally, we still see large positive yield increases in all crops (between 10% and 27%) with the new technologies (Fig. 3). For example, for rainfed maize in Africa we see the intensive response in action: exogenous yield increases alone would lead to an expected 24% improvement, but once market effects are taken into account, we observe only a 20% increase. In the case of sorghum, producers achieve higher than expected yield improvements and follow a land-sparing strategy reducing area allocated to the crop by one percent (316,000 ha). In the crop model, there can either be adoption or non-adoption in a unit area based on whether or not the technology provides a yield benefit compared to non-adoption. Therefore, the exogenous results in IMPACT are only based on the suitability of the technology as shown by the biophysical model (DSSAT). Biophysical suitability is just one factor that farmers will consider when deciding to adopt a new technology. Farmers weigh the benefits against the costs, and their choice is not entirely binary, as they may adopt a new technology partially. In IMPACT, we take this into account through the endogenous feedbacks of market prices on yields (Fig. 3). As a result, for wheat and potatoes, the endogenous results show very little change in aggregate yields as the adoption rate in the region is low (e.g. only four percent of area in China and Bangladesh). Overall, the new stress-resistant varieties reduce the adverse effects of declining water availability and increasing temperature. The resulting increase in production leads to lower prices relative to the case without the new varieties. Lower prices are a net gain to consumers, particularly poor consumers who spend a larger share of their income on food, and may reduce the prevalence of hunger. The effect of lower prices on producers is less clear as declines in unit prices may be offset by increased productivity. Small farmers are generally still net food consumers, and as such, the losses in farm revenue may still be less than gains farmers see from lower food prices.Endogenous yield effects are one of the key outputs of the structural approach, but they are not the only output that has a bearing on future scenarios of food security. When a productivity shock is introduced in the IMPACT economic model, world commodity prices and trade flows are affected. In our case study, adoption of improved varieties is simulated only in selected regions based on suitability and, as a result, the impact on global prices is fairly moderate. However, changes in productivity do affect national supply and demand, and therefore trade flows are affected.To summarize results shown in detail in Robinson et al. (2015b), adopting regions improve their productivity faster than projected changes in national-level demand when compared to a baseline without technology adoption. This translates into improving terms of trade where net importers are displacing imports with own production and net exporters are increasing their exports. This is a benefit at the national and local level that gets hidden in more aggregated analyses. While the new drought-tolerant and heat-tolerant technologies are likely to have important food security implications for adopting farmers and regions, food security in most countries, and globally, will be influenced more by changes in broader, global drivers such as population, income, productivity, and climate change. Linking physiological, crop simulation, and economic models is increasingly important in a world facing the complexities of climate change. The structural approach helps in estimating the impact of climate change on crop yields across different locations and cropping systems and offers the ability to simulate the effects of alternative adaptation strategies (Challinor et al., 2010;Nelson et al., 2009;Nelson et al., 2014;Rosegrant et al., 2014;Wiebe et al., 2015). This includes the adoption of alternative technologies that have not yet been developed to their full potential, by using physiological knowledge from agronomic and biological studies combined with a range of modeling tools. The availability of powerful computation allows researchers to simulate the uncertainty implicit in future climate conditions by linking biophysical and economic models to climate models. These represent a range of future climatic conditions and, in turn, are also linked to a suite of socioeconomic scenarios that represent key drivers of future change, such as population and GDP. Linking to economic models allows for market effects to be taken into account and is critical for policy-makers undertaking ex-ante assessments of technologies, particularly over the longer term.The case study represents the latest version of a methodological development process which resulted in an improved integration of crop, water, and economic models. The hard-link (Reilly and Willenbockel, 2010) between water allocation and water stress models on one side and the core economic model on the other allows for a more complete representation of climate risks across rainfed and irrigated systems (Calzadilla et al., 2013), while also simulating conditions where drivers other than climate change (e.g., competition from other of the economy) are affecting water supply to the agriculture sector. To date, few studies have tried to estimate the effects of adaptation options, whether whole, comprehensive policies or single-targeted measures (Easterling et al., 2007;Fernández and Blanco, 2015). Our approach also seeks to fill a gap noted by previous authors (Challinor et al., 2010) whereby the expertise of plant breeders, agronomists, and crop modelers could be pulled together via the GFSF network across the CGIAR centers to identify key climatetolerant traits to show the potential of DT and HT varieties.While continued development is necessary (and in progress) in all these areas, the current system provides a flexible framework to explicitly analyze new crop varieties as well as other agricultural technologies and practices. The modeling of new crop traits first in crop models and then in the economic model as independent scenarios, separate from reference or business-as-usual scenarios, helps to isolate and identify the effects of specific interventions and produce a stepwise analysis of complex adaptation strategies. This work was made possible through collaboration among CGIAR centers with diverse mandates and expertise, which provided detailed information on countries of adoption for each improved variety as well as estimated adoption rates which take into account technical and socioeconomic feasibility dimensions that influence adoption. Further collaboration in quantification of input parameters that describe the alternative technologies and their adoption during the scenario design process would benefit the comparison of technologies by using a consistent framework for drivers specified by the various CGIAR centers. Centers could also provide a range of adoption pathways for each of the crops in order to test the sensitivity of endogenous yield improvements and mitigation capabilities of specific technologies.In order to capture the effects of climate-induced changes in crop productivity, the structural approach relies greatly on the results of crop simulation models. These models are a powerful tool as their high geographic resolution and combination of climate and soil data allows researchers to develop highly-specific scenarios to better capture local conditions. The detailed nature of the models, however, requires large input datasets, including a thorough description of crop variety characteristics, management practices, and soil properties. This can be a challenge even for regions with strong data collection institutions (Thornton et al., 2010;Rosegrant et al., 2014).In the face of climate change and growing competing demands on both natural and financial resources, policy-makers need to prioritize investments. The structural approach can be used for decision-support in priority setting analyses. However, scenario design will play a critical role in how technologies can be compared. The design must capture key variables while limiting the number of differences across scenarios in order to isolate the effects of adoption of a particular technology. In the case presented here, for example, it would be difficult to conclude that one technology provided greater benefits than another because crops are adopted in different regions with varying adoption rates, while each of the regions is facing markedly different expected climate change effects. Future work will need to be designed with specific prioritization needs in mind.Cost is also important in the economic decision of whether or not to develop or adopt a specific technology. In order to prioritize, a policy-maker will need to look at development costs and weigh them against potential benefits. A welfare module that looks at these costs and benefits has already been developed as a post process to the IMPACT model and could be used as a next step to address the question of which technologies might be the best investments.It is recognized that food security is a multi-dimensional issue, including 1) food availability 2) access to food 3) stability and 4) food utilization (FAO, 2008). However, most simulation studies only capture one aspect of insecurity when looking at climate change impacts, i.e. availability (Schmidhuber and Tubiello, 2007). This is also a limitation in our study. We recognize that productivity increases are insufficient to address aspects such as access and the quality of food. Linkages to CGE models are being developed to measure the effects of changing incomes on food security. Scenarios exploring changes in diet are also important. Links between IMPACT results on climate and changing diets and a health model developed at Oxford University allow for much broader estimates of dietary risk factor and health outcomes (Springmann et al., 2016). Further connection to diet composition models focused on a wide range of macro and micronutrients will also improve these models' abilities to explore food security impacts of technology adoption.The combination of climate, crop, and economic models allows researchers to estimate changes in yields and other parameters that include both biophysical and socioeconomic factors. The final yields capture the influence of GCMs, the interactions between soil, climate, and crop management, as well as market effects and the impact of socioeconomic (population and GDP) drivers. Adding to this approach is the modeling of specific traits (e.g. drought and heat tolerance) explicitly in both the crop and economic models. This allows us to estimate the effect of specific options for adaption to climate change, which can help policy-makers better understand the consequences of targeted actions in their priority setting exercises.Historical data and field level trial data can be used to calibrate and validate models in this structural framework. However, in order to help policy-makers and farmers adapt to climate change, these must be translated into forward looking simulations and scenarios. There is more than one way to model adoption of technologies but, to provide the strongest case for adoption, analysis of climate change effects needs to incorporate economic feedback to capture socioeconomic as well as biophysical interactions. Finally, to better inform decision-making, the structural approach needs to be further developed to improve post-processing of economic information on supply and demand to estimate effects on food security, nutrition, environmental impacts, and welfare.","tokenCount":"5250"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"b893b1782a59442fd073b8a8418ccb5c","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/0b2da2c8-c9a5-459d-8c4f-5cef735e974b/retrieve","id":"-576616119"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"64e2d90a-d5d9-4543-a2d7-ec2c3180ff4d","pagecount":"29","content":"Introduction -Definition of innovation processes 2. Approaches and methods being applied to meet various objectives: 2.1. Approaches for priority setting 2.2. Farmer experimentation 2.3. Participatory approach to extension 2.4. Successful examples of impact 3. Building farmers' knowledge and understanding of processes 4. Access and use of information 5. Scaling up 5.1 Incorporating scaling up considerations into project planning 5.2 Micro-credit 6. Partnerships and Capacity building 7. Approaches to funding R&D 8. Conclusions limitations and challenges 9. ReferencesWhat are innovation processes? CIAT's Rural Innovation Institute defines rural innovation as \"the process by which various stakeholders generate, adapt or adopt novel ideas, approaches, technologies or ways of organizing, to improve on-and off-farm activities, so that the rural sector becomes more competitive in a sustainable manner\" (CIAT, 2003). This process builds farmers' capacity to learn about knowledge intensive processes and biological and ecological complexities and can create a sustained, collective capacity for innovation focused on improving livelihoods and the management of natural resources. To support these processes, institutional changes are also needed in the management and funding of formal sector research and development to encourage this paradigm shift, to build new partnerships and to avoid business-as-usual in the formal sector. This enhanced capacity for innovation benefits rural people 's ability to demand and use science to develop technology for improving their livelihoods, and it spills over into and benefits rural people's initiatives for change in other sectors such as health, education, governance and social order Enabling innovation requires a versatile approach to working with communities that centers on several related elements, which have emerged from experience and analysis. Innovation processes require farmer experimentation, social and human capital formation, access to information, leadership and entrepreneurship to develop new technologies, products and markets and ways of organizing, as well as policies and institutional arrangements which catalyze and enable innovativeness. The key components of innovation processes can be summarized as:1. Farmer experimentation: The active involvement of end-users in research design and development enables researchers and stakeholders to understand local farming systems and the larger context within which they exist, to incorporate local knowledge into technology innovation, and to develop locally appropriate solutions. A hallmark of farmer participatory research (FPR) approaches is the link it establishes between the formal and local research systems (Ashby et al., 2000). 2. Strengthening human capital, which involves enhancing farmers' knowledge and understanding processes. There is growing evidence that building rural people's capacities to innovate is probably more important than just involving them in developing the technology. Enhancing farmers' technical skills and research capabilities, and involving them as decision-makers in the technology development, should result in interventions that are more responsive to their priorities, needs and constraints. 3. Social capital: Innovative collective action by rural communities with substantial social capital is an essential condition for enabling innovation. Various studies show that strengthening group working processes and enhancing social capital is an important asset that can provide a variety of supportive mechanisms for enhancing rural livelihoods. At the community level, strengthening the social capital of rural communities and their organizational capacity is critical for horizontal and vertical linkages among communities, and between communities and rural service providers. 4. Enhancing access to information and linking local or indigenous knowledge to scientific knowledge are major resources in supporting innovation processes. A key issue is to understand how best rural innovation can be enhanced through supporting experimentation with effective combinations of local knowledge systems and formal scientific knowledge. 5. Strengthening partnerships and sharing roles and responsibilities across the research-for-development continuum is an important part of managing innovation processes. Building strategic partnerships allows us to decentralize control over the research agenda and permits a much broader set of stakeholders to become involved in research and the technology innovation process. 6. Scaling up innovation processes leads to \"more quality benefits to more people over a wider geographic area more quickly, more equitably and more lastingly\" (IIRR, 2000). Scaling up implies increasing the impact of an innovation or intervention to its logical or appropriate level, and also reaching larger numbers of people (Gonsalves, 2001). This definition also reflects the concern with quality of the impact in terms of sustainability and equity. 7. Strengthening changes in formal sector institutions to support innovation processes. It is important to integrate mechanisms that can influence policy making so that critical success factors for rural innovation are maximized, and bottlenecks overcome. This requires strategies that use information produced by research to influence policy and enhances key rural innovation processes and outcomes.This synthesis paper provides an overview of papers submitted under the 'Enhancing Innovation Process and Partnership' theme. We organize our synthesis around each of the key elements identified as being fundamental to good practice for \"enabling Innovation\". We have summarized the papers accepted under each element with detailed lessons learned. The lessons and critical issues are then synthesized to develop conclusions, key implications for national research institutes such as NARO and a section on limitations and challenges.There is strong evidence that involving farmers/end-users as decision-makers in the technology design and development process can lead to the development of appropriate technology and may increase the probability of adoption among the intended users. These participatory research and learning approaches are fast gaining recognition as a strategy for empowering poor farming families to articulate their priorities and to participate as decisionmakers in the R&D processes. However, important questions that arise are: What is participation? Should all research be participatory? Is there good vs. bad participation? What is the optimum level of participation?To understand the quality of participation that can be applied in research for development processes we apply a conceptual framework based on Johnson, et al. (2002) that links the typology of participation (Lilja and Ashby, 1999) to the different types of participatory approaches outlined by Biggs and Farrington (1991). Lilja and Ashby (2002) argue that the expected impacts of incorporating stakeholder participation in research are dependent on the stage at which stakeholders (especially farmers as end-users) are involved in the technology development process. They developed a typology of participation which defines the two decision-makers as \"scientists\" and \"farmers.\" In their definition \"farmers\" is a generic term representing end-users and the term \"scientists\" is used to describe outside agencies, the extension system or formal R&D agencies. An important premise underlying the typology of participation is that differences in who makes a decision (between the \"farmer\" and \"scientist\") will result in different decisions being made and in different types of impact on the innovation process. Farmers can be involved in the technology development process in any of the three stages of innovation process (design, testing and diffusion). In each of these stages different decisions related to technology options are made. For example, in the design stage decisions on opportunities and problems, and prioritization of research options and potential solutions are made. In the testing stage, testing and comparing possible solutions is conducted. During this stage decisions are made about what type of experimentation and how different stakeholders will be involved. The final stage is diffusion, which involves dissemination of results and building the capacity for implementation of recommended solutions among future users. This stage leads to full or partial adoption (if necessary after further adaptation by users), or to no adoption.In order to understand the balance of power in a participatory process, a critical question is to find out who makes the decisions at each stage of the technology development process between \"scientists\" and \"farmers.\" Biggs and Farrington (1991) define five different types of participatory approaches depending on who makes the decisions at each stage in the innovation process. The different types are detailed below:• Conventional (non-participatory): Scientists make the decisions alone without organized communication with farmers. • Consultative (functional participation): Scientists make the decisions alone, but with organized communication with farmers. Scientists know about farmers' opinions, preferences and priorities through organized one-way communication with them. Scientists may or may not let this information affect their decision. • Collaborative (empowering participation): The decision is shared between farmers and scientists, and involves organized communication among them. Scientists and farmers know about one another's opinions, preferences and priorities through organized two-way communication. The decisions are made jointly; neither scientists nor farmers make them on their own. No party has a right to revoke the shared decision. • Collegial (empowering participation): Farmers make the decisions collectively in a group process or through individual farmers who are involved in organized communication with scientists. Farmers know about scientists' opinions, preferences, proposals and priorities through organized two-way communication. Farmers may or may not let this information affect their decision. • Farmer experimentation: Farmers make the decisions individually or in a group without organized communication with scientists.Why does it matter who makes the decisions? Lilja and Ashby (2002) argue that farmer participation at different stages of innovation can have different impact on the technology or innovation design, as well as, on the potential adoption or acceptance among the intended users. If scientists make all the key decisions without farmer participation in the early stage of an innovation process, farmers cannot influence many features of the innovation that are of most interest to them. Their participation in planning and setting goals will help focus research more directly towards farmers' priority needs, thus reducing time to conclusion, improving the efficiency of the process and reducing the likelihood that the technologies being developed are ultimately unacceptable to farmers. There is evidence (Douthwaite, et al., 2002;Johnson, et al., 2002) that farmer participation at different design stages may steer research into completely unanticipated directions or may identify different priorities different beneficiaries.We maintain that farmer participation, together with a broadening of research for development partnerships, can harness additional and much-needed expertise and resources to solving practical problems and reaching a greater number of beneficiaries, while eventually allowing the formal research sector to reallocate resources towards strategic research that addresses the problems that need to be faced in the future.Farmer participatory research (FPR) draws heavily from earlier models developed to work with rural communities, such as the farming systems research and extension (FSR&E) of the 1970's. These approaches to farmer innovation and agricultural research received widespread recognition with the publishing of the \"Farmer First\" (Chambers, 1989) and later \"Beyond Farmer First\" (Chambers, 1994). The term 'farmer participatory research' is used to define a diverse group of research-related approaches where farmers and rural communities are involved at different stages in the research process (Okali et al., 1994;Selener, 1997). In practice, the term FPR is used interchangeably with other terms such as participatory technology development (PTD) or farmer experimentation (FE) approaches. It is now widely accepted that farmer participatory research may have wider applications for improving rural livelihoods in complex and diverse low potential areas where a \"systems\" approach is critical for the analysis and improvement of the production systems (Chambers and Jiggins, 1986;Okali et al., 1994).This section reviews different participatory approaches that have been used to involve farmers or end-users in the technology design and development process. The approaches are divided into: (1) Approaches for priority setting; (2) Approaches for farmer experimentation;(3) Approaches to extension; (4) Successful examples of impacts.Approaches for priority setting The manual of Tripp and Woolley (1989) has long been a standard reference manual for priority setting in on-farm research; following a clearly outlined farming systems approach, this methodology has been widely adopted in the intervening years. The planning stages are described as: identifying problems that limit the productivity of a farming system; ranking the problems; identifying their causes and analyzing interactions among problems and causes; identifying possible solutions; and evaluating those solutions. ISNAR long advised an analogous approach for setting priorities at the broader level of national or zonal agricultural research, in which local concerns should be harmonized with national policies and objectives; many NARIs have followed this, if often in a less exhaustive and data-demanding manner.A Ugandan example is given by Grimaud et al. (2004), who identified research activities for dairy sector development in Mbarara. These authors describe a participatory rural appraisal (PRA) by researchers of the main dairy farming systems in the study area and a rapid questionnaire survey of a random sample of farms. From these results, researchers deduced a farm classification (typology) based on three \"poles\": the farmer (status and activities), the herd (composition and use) and the environmental conditions (feeding system, housing conditions, moving). Researchers assessed needs for each production system and proposed interventions that would meet the requirements of producers. Research priorities included basic biological relationships (e.g. the importance of genetic variation in growth rates of Ankole calves) and understanding the system (e.g. possible health implications for people). Although Grimaud et al. comment that the identification of interventions can be made by local experts based on a participatory interview of farmers, the farmers' opinions do not come through as an essential element in this approach. Thus the reliance upon researcher measurements required an 18-month period of farm visits before constraints and interventions could be identified.Variation among farms and farmers almost always needs to be faced. As commented by Mburu and Macharia (2004), \"Diversity exists in soil management because different soil types often require different management regimes. Even when farmers are in the same area and managing the same type of soils they may do so differently, because they are faced with different social and economic conditions.\" In this Kenyan case of re-orienting the research priorities of a regional research center, the research team was constituted to be interdisciplinary --bringing together specializations in farm management, socio-economics, animal science, agronomy and crop physiology, land-use and soil fertility -so as to take a holistic approach to farming systems. The team also emphasized participation of stakeholders --farmers, extension staff, researchers and local administration personnel.A critical improvement on the usual practice was the holding of farmers' meetings at which PRA results were used with soil maps, farmer-drawn matrices and group discussions to \"jog the memories\" of both men and women. Identifying farm types, using farm observations, semi-structured interviews, farm sketches and a household survey facilitated the identification and ranking of soil management problems, causes and opportunities for each farm type. Information was then verified by transect walks along a route selected by farmers, government extension staff and the research team (allowing observations on soils, land use and management practices), supported by a formal interview with a selected number of farmers. An unusual strength of their approach was the use of a farmer-led evaluation of the process itself.In this case, farmers themselves identified the set of criteria used to determine whether soil and water management was good or bad --recognizing that soil and water management level is determined by access to and ownership of resources. In small groups guided by a facilitator -another key ingredient --farmers in each management category identified the main problems using problem-causal trees and ranked the corresponding opportunities. Mburu and Macharia (2004) summarize well: \"Learning and sharing with the farmers in a participatory manner helped to converge local technical knowledge with the outsiders' knowledge. Making sense of the data through pair-wise ranking and wealth ranking was important in identification, analysis and prioritization of constraints and opportunities. Screening of prioritized options on the basis of economic competitiveness, their contribution to social equity and appropriateness to environment conservation led to identification of relevant research issues.\" Gender analysis took into account the different perspectives of male and female farmers: for example, acquiring cash and labor for soil fertility interventions would be tackled by men through farm produce sales and adoption of implements respectively, and by women through group activities. Soam (2004) describes an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) that employs multiple criteria based on trade offs and the relative importance of criteria and research alternatives as perceived by various stakeholders. Farmers screened alternative objectives, criteria were identified jointly, but both objectives and criteria were evaluated by the scientists on the grounds that they have to carry research under their constraints, opportunities and policies. The strongest element of the AHP method seemed to be in stimulating group discussion to incorporate farmers' knowledge, resources and expectations. Another variant is to apply congruence analysis to allocate research resources in proportion to the relative value of a production system or product.In drawing out best practices, we need to remember that the term \"PRA\" is overused and has come to mean little -because the devil is in the detail of the methodology as it is applied. Of the three priority-setting papers reviewed, only Soams draws specific attention to the risk of suppression of farmers' opinion by the scientists' opinion. Full participation of farmers in setting research priorities is even more important as system complexity increases -for example, time and costs in setting initial priorities might have been reduced considerably in the Ugandan dairy case.Instead of a general blanket technological recommendation, even if honed to each farm type, a basket of options should normally be the aim of initial priority setting, with some interventions ready for extension and further confidence-building with farmers and others emerging as items in the new research agenda. Pair-wise comparisons are useful both in ensuring rigor and in encouraging shared decision-making with communities. The criticism that the method is time-consuming and tiresome can be reduced by short-listing the criteria, and the researchable options, at the farmers' level, followed by a two-stage process of design and evaluation.A good practice would be to use early and highly participatory setting of some priorities and thereby allow R&D activities to proceed quickly, with researchers and farmers continuing to interact and define or refine other priorities over the subsequent couple of years. Getting more quickly to the stage of testing a few interventions of interest to farmers is particularly important because their expectations of a new and more productive relationship with researchers are likely to be raised by the priority setting activities.The active involvement of end-users in the design and development of technologies enables researchers and stakeholders to examine and understand the local farming systems and the larger context within which they exist, to incorporate local knowledge into technology innovation, and to develop locally appropriate solutions. The examples that for follow show how various projects have endeavored to involve end-users in the technology design and development process. Sanginga et al. (2004) outline an integrated approach for demand-driven and marketorientated agricultural research and rural agro-enterprise development. Termed Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI), this approach offers a practical framework to link farmer participatory research and market research in a way that empowers farmers to better manage their resources and offers them prospects of an upward spiral out of poverty. ERI uses participatory processes to build the capacities of farmers' groups and rural communities in marginal areas to identify and evaluate their market opportunities, develop profitable agroenterprises, intensify production through experimentation, while sustaining the resource base upon which their livelihoods depend. The approach emphasizes integrating scientific expertise with farmer knowledge, and strengthening social organization and entrepreneurial organizations through effective partnership between research, development and rural communities. As part of the strengthening of human and social capital, ERI encompasses effective and proactive strategies for promoting gender and equity into accessing market opportunities and improved technologies, and in the distribution of additional incomes and other benefits.A unique aspect of ERI is that the approach links the management community assets (natural, human, social, physical and financial) to production, post-harvest handling and marketing in a resource-to-consumption (R-to-C) framework. The R-to-C system (for more details see Kaaria and Ashby, 2001) expands conventional production-to-consumption or commodity chain approaches by explicitly basing decisions on what productive activities to engage in and the combination of community assets that will best meet the dual needs of household food production and income generation. Brummett et al. (2004) provide a realistic alternative to traditional technology development and transfer that has been utilized by the WorldFish Center to integrate pond fish culture into farming systems in Malawi and Cameroon. This aims to create joint learning exercises whereby research is driven by real problems, extension delivers clear messages and farmers get the technology they need. Farmers, extension agents and researchers get together at the end of the season to present, compare and discuss findings, in preparation for another cycle of research. The approach, called the Farmer Scientist Research Partnership (for details see Brummett & Noble 1995), involves: (1) The Research-Extension Team (RET) model using a research scientist to guide joint learning exercises (participatory research projects) undertaken by farmers and extension agents working together. (2) Resource flow diagramming (RFD) to characterize the farms in terms of their resource base and show the movement of resources around the farm and into the surrounding economy. (3) The theoretical farming system model created during the re-drawing session is used by farmers and researchers as a guide for conducting applied experiments both on-farm and on the experiment station. (4) A monitoring and evaluation tool, RESTORE, is used to assess farming systems transformation and longer-term ecological, capacity and economic development of farms and farmers. Danda and Lewa (2004) present an example of an empowering approach drawn from Kenya's Agricultural Technology and Information Response Initiative (ATIRI), which was started in response to low adoption of technologies developed by the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) and other research organizations in the country. The initiative links stakeholders in the research to extension continuum, including farmers, community based organizations, NGOs, extension and in some cases the private sector. The approach attempts to link farmers' priorities, opportunities and challenges with the available technologies. This contrasts with the other models in that technologies and knowledge are extended to communities according to diagnosis of problems by farmers in conjunction with research teams, and discussion of possible intervention strategies with the guidance of research teams. The initiative is supported by an elaborate monitoring and evaluation at the institutional level, with various steering committees responsible for assessing the progress of farmer groups and community based organizations that have benefited from the grants. Mubiru et al. (2004) share experiences of the Soils and Soil Fertility Management Programme (SSFMP) of Uganda's National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) and its partners to illustrate the variety of participatory approaches they have used. The approaches reviewed include participatory on-farm trials/demonstrations, Farmer Field Schools (FFS), Participatory Development Communication (PDC) and Participatory Learning and Action Research (PLAR). Participatory on-farm research (POFR)/ demonstration has three components, the diagnostic component to understand the farm and its environment as well as the farmers' goals, challenges, and opportunities; the experimental component involves designing appropriate innovations and testing under real farm conditions; and the monitoring and evaluation component, and analyzing the causes of non-adoption (see Mutsaers et al., 1997 for details). Farmer Field Schools (FFS) aim to empower farmers to be technical experts on major aspects of crop and livestock production, improve the farmer decision-making capacity and stimulate local innovation (Braun et al., 2000). Additionally, the integration of farmer experiences and knowledge with research and extension stimulates technology adaptation and adoption. A school curriculum is designed to provide basic agroecological knowledge and skills but in a participatory manner so that farmer experiences are integrated in the learning process. The schools are coordinated by a facilitator who meets with the farmers regularly (at least once a week) in the farmers' communal gardens. The PLAR approach uses PRA tools to allow farmers to identify their agricultural production and socio-economic opportunities and challenges; farmers then identify their soil fertility management classes and constraints to good management; and, finally, farmers design experiments to test and evaluate various options to improve soil fertility management. The PDC approach underscores communication as a tool for development and entails several mechanisms for disseminating information among various stakeholders, applying PRA methods to identify agricultural production and socio-economic opportunities and challenges; from these challenges, community groups are formed and facilitated to develop participatory action plans that define communication needs, objectives, activities to achieve the objectives, and a tool to execute the activities. Snapp et al. (2004) present a case study from southern Africa of the mother and baby (MB) trial design to improve maize-based system productivity through legume intensification. This participatory approach is an upstream methodology designed to improve the flow of information between farmers and researchers about technology performance and appropriateness under farmer conditions. The trial design consists of two types --mother and baby trials. The mother trial is researcher-designed and conforms to scientific requirements for publishable data and analysis. A baby trial consists of a single replicate of one or more technologies from the mother trial. A single farmer manages each baby trial on his or her own land. A typical implementation of the methodology would include a single mother trial and numerous baby trials within a village. The MB trial methodology has three goals: (1) To generate data on which to assess technology performance under realistic farmer conditions.(2) To complement the agronomic trial data with farmers' assessments of the adoption potential of technologies; this information helps researchers understand how the technologies fit into farmers' broader farming and livelihood strategies. (3) To encourage farmers to participate actively in the trials and stimulate farmer experimentation with, and adoption of, new technologies and practices. MB trials attempt to address market linkages and seed multiplication issues as a strategy for scaling up the impacts.Ssewannyana and Rees (2004) present a new method based on the three livestock improvement sub-projects funded by COARD project where farmers were fully involved in all activities and played central roles in the improvement programs. The three sub-projects followed five main areas: (i) Setting the benchmarks, which involves capturing data on the socio-demography of households (land size, family size, level of education, marital status of household head), data on livestock (types, numbers, management, animal health, marketing and indigenous technical knowledge) and feed resource bases. (ii) Trainings using experiential learning where discussions, dialogues and sharing experiences were key features. (ii) Implementation modalities where farmers were fully involved in the development of the improved animal breeds -from planning, designing, implementation, monitoring and evaluation. (iv) Sustainability, which is achieved by an emphasis on the formation of Farmer Breeder Associations with elected executive committees with written constitutions and registration certificates from the relevant government organs. (v) Networking among breeders associations, SAARI and the National Animal Genetic Resources Center and Data Bank (NAGRC&DB).NARO's COARD project (Rees et al., 2004b -see also Section 3 and 7) assesses the type and quality of participation found during subsequent implementation of COARD's research sub-projects. They found that the type and quality of participation varied considerablyroughly three-quarters were classified as contractual or collaborative participation, and only a quarter as collegiate. The authors state that \"Internationally supported NGOs seem to have the highest capacity for proposal writing and implementing collegiate-style, participatory type projects, but generally have to out-source technical expertise. Many NARO staff also have good capacity for proposal writing and implementing participatory type projects that can be classified as collaborative or contractual. Local NGOs and local government extension staff seem to have least experience with proposal writing and participatory approaches. Most, but not all, university-led proposals received were extractive in nature, with farmers' roles seen as testing solutions designed by university staff.\" Internationally supported NGOs also seemed to have the highest capacity for partnership rather than individualistic approaches to projects. The Nepal case frankly reports that research scientists and reviewers are \"still largely entrenched in the old supply-driven technology generation paradigm that sees technologies being delivered to a grateful extension service, who then instruct willing farmers on what they should be doing.\"At the beginning of this section, we argue that the point at which farmers or end-users are involved in the technology design process will influence the results of the project. So for example, when farmers are involved in priority setting, it is more likely that technology development will respond to the needs and priorities of the community. When farmers and end-users have a collaborative or collegial relationship with scientists and are involved in all stages of the technology development process --from design to diffusion with a strong capacity building component --then this leads to empowerment. However, when farmers and scientists are involved in a consultative relationship in which scientists make the decisions and the initial priorities, a functional type of participation is the likely mode. One of the challenges with the functional type of participatory approaches, , is that project objective and activities are usually already well defined by the time the project is implemented so the scope for farmer influence is limited to providing information on how technologies work on farm, on assessments and rankings, and can be useful in selecting technologies for future testing.In considering what is best practice for technology innovation, an important issue raised by two of the papers is the aspect of linking research to markets. Experience shows that smallholder farmers key concern is not only agricultural productivity and household food consumption, but also increasingly better market access. Once farmers are able to produce enough, then accessing markets to sell surplus becomes an important concern. Therefore, it becomes critical to enhance the ability of smallholder, resource-poor farmers to access market opportunities and their links to markets.An additional factor noted was the limited use of gender-sensitive participatory approaches, and therefore limitations in addressing the specific needs of small holders, especially women and the poor. The issue of social and gender differences is clearly highlighted in the paper by Sanginga et al. (2004). While in their review of the PLAR approach Mubiru et al. ( 2004) mention wealth differences and its effect on testing of soil fertility management options. If end-users such as women and the poorest are brought into the research process at a very late stage, particularly to evaluate technologies that have already been developed and are ready for dissemination, such technologies are often inappropriate for the needs of the poor and women.The two main objectives of research are to generate knowledge and disseminate/adapt that knowledge so that it can be applied. In the last few decades, a lot of research by both national and international research institutions has culminated in new knowledge and new technologies that have potential to increase agricultural production but without translation into increased production and improved livelihoods for the intended beneficiaries. Some of the impediments have been lack of awareness of the new technologies by the intended beneficiaries, low adoption due to inadequate practical applicability and feasibility of the technologies, and low capacity of the intended beneficiaries to adopt them.The role of extension is to provide a bridge between these technologies and new knowledge and the intended beneficiaries by creating awareness of their existence, providing the necessary information in a way that is easily understood and applicable, and generally assisting them to implement and adapt these technologies to their local situations. Up to the late 1980s, the most common method of disseminating results and technologies was the training and visit system. However with declining resources to national agricultural extension systems, this expensive and inflexible approach has been generally dropped. A myriad of participatory extension approaches have been tried, such as the Farmer Field Schools, the PEA approach, the client oriented approach, farmer-to-farmer extension and the demand driven approach. The papers in this section describe and give results of several attempts to understand and use some of these approaches.The ATIRI project in Kenya (Danda and Lewa, 2004; see also section 2.2) invites groups of farmers to write proposals to KARI to utilize any of the technologies that KARI has developed. The farmers are assisted to do this by scientists, extension officers, NGOs and/or CBOs. KARI gives farmer groups a grant to purchase the technology, inputs required to implement the technology and to pay for technical services. The initiative has assisted the institute to reach large numbers of farmers within a relatively short time with their technologies and services. The grant has removed the financial constraints usually associated with non-adoption of new and improved technologies by farmers. The formation of groups has created entry points for other service providers such as NGOs, private sector, and micro-finance institutions that enhance farmer access to other services. This initiative makes several assumptions. One is that farmers will prioritize their problems and appropriately match these problems or constraints with the available technologies. This is a big assumption considering that farmer groups may not have information on the full range of available options or the knowledge of which options are most suited to solving their problems or constraints. The other main assumption is that the NGOs and government extension have adequate capacity to support farmer groups in problem diagnosis, proposal development, management of funds, monitoring and evaluation, and other skills that the farmers need to implement these technologies. In practice, the capacity of the NGOs and CBOs as well as other service providers need to be strengthened for them to effectively support farmers. The paper makes a good attempt of documenting the achievements and impacts of the initiative at the levels of research, extension, farmer group and community. These are, however, at the very basic (activity) level of what was done, with little information on results or outcomes that would measure the impact in a more robust way. Linking this to the later issue of monitoring and evaluation, it would be critical to try and measure impact from the perspectives of the farmer groups themselves and the community based organizations. Sinja et al. (2004) focus their work on identifying characteristics that influence farmer-tofarmer extension. The role of farmer-to-farmer extension has been appreciated for a long time, because there is ample evidence in literature that farmers get much of their information on various aspects of their lives from their peers. Arising from this fact, studies have been carried out to understand farmer-to-farmer extension, what contributes to this and how effective it is, and what kind of messages are suited to this form of extension. This paper looks at the farmer and farm characteristics that influence farmer-to-farmer extension of fodder technologies in Kenya. They discuss factors such as the age of the farmer, education, distances to markets and off-farm income, and using a Tobit model analyze their significance in influencing whether farmers pass on technologies and information to other farmers.The paper does not mention or analyze the social networks that exist in communities and have a great influence on how farmers share and exchange information and technologies. Typically, farmers share information and materials with their kin, extended families, and friends --social interactions within communities that may largely explain farmer to farmer extension irrespective of distances to markets, farmer's age or education. The type information shared by farmers is also crucial to analyze so as to understand whether some information types are passed on to other farmers more than others, why this is so and whether these can be supplemented by external information sources. The modes of passing technologies and information by farmers are varied: they may sell technologies such as seed but give information free; they may sell technologies to neighbors but give the same free to relatives or friends; others may sell both information and technologies. These modes of passing information have a bearing on the members of the community that have access to these technologies: if they are passed on by sale, poorer members of the community may not have effective access.A major reason that has been advanced for non-adoption of improved technologies by farmers is the nature of the technology recommendations that are given to them by both researchers and extension officers includes; how easy the technology is to implement, what are its requirements for implementation, whether the technology is in conflict with previous recommendations for this or other technologies amongst others. The paper by Ramaru et al. (2004) on facilitating linkages between farmers and other service/input providers provides useful insights into participatory processes that can yield multiple benefits for smallholder farmers, including access not only to technologies but also to other services such as inputs. This, as the authors argue, requires great organizational capacity on the part of the farmers, a capacity that does not just happen but requires facilitation by intermediaries such as extension officers or NGOs. Mutimba (2004) in their paper on extending soil and water conservation technologies assess outcomes of soil and water conservation extension messages using student projects at the Department of Agricultural Extension Education in Makerere University. The paper has crucial findings that those planning and carrying out farmer extension should be concerned about and address. In this example, incorrect diagnosis of farmer problems led to inappropriate recommendations on soil and water conservation --such as erosion control while the key constraints were related to soil fertility. This raises the issue of whether researchers and extension recommend what farmers actually need based on their resources, or just recommend what they themselves have information and knowledge about their pet subjects. The applicability or feasibility of the recommendation given to farmers is also brought into question in this paper. For the most common recommendations for soil and water conservation, farmers did not have the resources to implement them and, as a result, they implemented them partially or not at all due to scarcity of resources for the recommended technologies. Mutimba (2004) argues that recommendations, such as mulching, would lead to more serious environmental concerns than those supposedly being addressed by the research --since the materials for mulching would have been obtained from the already degraded wetlands.Multiple and sometimes conflicting recommendations for the same technologies from different sources, or conflicting recommendations from different technologies, makes it very difficult to assess whether farmers have followed correct technological specifications --or indeed whether they have the correct information. Measuring the effectiveness of these extension recommendations is very difficult.More and more often, agricultural research projects are experiencing a shift away from centralized, biophysical technology-led top down approaches towards more decentralized participatory approaches, which are flexible and iterative. Agricultural research is less and less about generating finished technologies (high yielding varieties, fertilizer recommendations) but is becoming more concerned about reaching resource poor farmers and other stakeholders, and building their capacity to adapt to changing conditions. An important component of any innovation process is therefore to demonstrate the extent to which it creates positive impacts to the livelihoods of poor people, or result in improving the performance and effectiveness of agricultural research and development organizations.Nina et al ( 2001) distinguished three broad types of impacts: technology impacts, process impacts, and cost impacts. More recently, IDRC introduced the concept of outcome mapping to capture behavioral and institutional changes brought about to project boundary partners. Technology impacts are related to direct benefits of the technology or innovation been promoted, and the direct benefits to its users. These are referred to in a range of terms, for example, adoption rates, incomes, yields increase, or productivity changes. Increasingly innovation system approaches are being promoted as part of co-learning processes relating to the building of farmers and stakeholders capacity to innovate and conduct experiments, leading to the impacts of human and social capital benefits from participation. Johnson et al. (2002) argue that these process type impacts relate to the types of approaches and occur as a result of the participation itself rather than as a result of the technologies developed via participatory research methods. Process impacts are often qualitative impacts relating to the empowerment function and capacity building of an innovation system. They include impact assessment systems which look beyond the technical indicators of agricultural research (such as yields, resistance to pests and diseases), and other socio-economic indicators (adoption rates, income, cost-benefits), to focus attention on the process of participation, their outcomes and impacts.Most papers in this theme demonstrate that the use of innovative research and development methods has resulted in considerable technology impacts. Brumett et al. (2004) show that in areas where participatory research approaches to aquaculture have been tested, typical adoption rates by farmers reached 86%, with about 76% of farmers adopting more than one technology. The number of farmer groups has also expanded significantly reaching more than 225 farmers from the original 34 farmers practicing aquaculture. Similarly, Odogola et al. (2004) demonstrate that the institutional building approach to micro-credit initiative attained a 250% increase in community membership from 163 persons to 471 persons in four years. The accumulated membership savings also rose eleven fold to over 15 millions UShs. In Soroti, some 192 farmer field schools (FFS) involving over 4800 farmers have been established and trained in various agricultural technologies and management practices.Friss-Hansen and Kodoido (2004) show that members of FFS and NAADS groups have significantly higher levels of technology use and adoption compared to other farmers. Similar findings are reported by Kayobo and Laker-Ojok ( 2004) who found that the LIFE project has resulted in significant achievement and higher adoption rates of a range of recommended agricultural technologies. Participating farmers generally reported higher incomes, increased food availability, and improved ability of poor households to send their children to schools, improve their housing conditions and meet other livelihood requirements (Odogola et al., 2004).Some papers report evidence of farmers' priorities influencing the FFS program to include in their curricula other livelihood aspects beyond agriculture that have impacts on their livelihoods. The FFS curricula now include HIV/AIDS awareness, nutrition and hygiene, reproductive and family health care, business management, etc. This multi-dimensional approach has led to strong partnerships between NAADS and other government departments, NGOs and other rural service providers. It was also observed that, gradually, the emphasis in determining research objectives and programs is gradually shifting from formal research systems, to more consultative and collaborative processes where farmers have a greater role to participate in research planning and early testing and evaluation of technologies. However, there is little evidence in the papers on the impacts of the innovation on research and development organizations, and on boundary partners in terms of changes in their organizational practices and behaviors. Sanginga et al. (2004) give examples of changes in partner organizations as a result of collaborative research on enabling rural innovation in Africa.One missing component of impact assessment in all the papers is outcome mapping. Outcome mapping means a detailed description of the changes in the behavior relationships, activities and actions of stakeholders that can be logically linked although not necessarily caused by a project, a program or a development actor (Earl et al., 2001). It seeks to characterize and assess the contribution made by stakeholders and development partners, projects or organizations to the achievement of specific outcomes. Another important concern is the assessment of the distributional impacts of innovation, especially on gender, power relations, and poverty.Most studies expressed the limitations of current approaches to address issues of gender, equity and sustainability. Friss-Hansen and Kodoido (2004) observed that although both NAADS and the FFS approach advocate equity and a pro-poor focus, the poorer sections of the population (women, elderly, poor) have been excluded and have not benefited.Another aspect that is not covered by the papers is the impact of participation on research organizations' costs. This is important because a criticism of participatory approaches is that the process is slow and increases costs of doing research. On the hand, proponents of participatory approaches argue that involving end-users reduces research costs to formal research organizations because research roles are shared and borne by the various stakeholders. These papers do not analyze cost impacts of the innovation. Aspects of building farmer knowledge and capacity are also addressed in Section 5 below.The combination of scientific and local knowledge systems has been studied extensively over the last two decades in an attempt to see how research knowledge can be targeted to better address local needs, rather than following the one-solution-fits-all approach (Altieri, 1990;Barrios et al., 1994;Walker et al., 1995;Sandor and Furbee, 1996). The use of participatory methods to evaluate technology options with farmers or to include farmer criteria for taste, color, etc in breeding programs is well documented. Rural populations are facing the threat of increased poverty and further land degradation unless increased resources or knowledge generate adequate income and opportunities to overcome soil degradation. The two examples presented to this conference cover aspects of linking knowledge systems for genetic diversity and participatory land use management to address these constraints.The first paper (Mulumba et al, 2004) undertook to identify and understand the best practices for conservation of rare banana landraces in Uganda's semi-arid area and showed that farmers are actively conserving this diversity within their communities but that climate change, increasing land pressure and cultural changes are affecting their ability to do so. It was difficult to see if the management practices identified were really related to the different varieties or if farmers just invested more time and, therefore, used more management practices, on the more commercial and food security varieties rather than targeting management practices specifically to conserve a variety.It would have been very useful in the study if the varieties that were wanted by the communities were identified, the most important characteristics of each and, from the community's perspective, what warranted conservation. The approach taken of identifying the amount grown of each variety and then correlating this to how they were managed did not allow this to be done and has therefore missed the opportunity to develop a more participatory approach that could have elicited key steps in ensuring genetic diversity related to land management. Gowing et al. (2004) aimed to develop a methodology for integrating scientific soil survey products with indigenous knowledge surveys for improved decision making. The research highlighted the importance of a systematic and iterative exploration of indigenous knowledge, which must extend beyond the level of rapid rural appraisal and include several different techniques of cross-validation of interpretations of indigenous soil classification systems to avoid premature conclusions being drawn. In many studies, the first impression from comparing scientific and local knowledge soil maps is that farmers' knowledge of soils is inconsistent and unreliable, but experience gained through research in this paper and others shows that much of the apparent variation derives from the method of investigation. For example, in Uganda, it became clear that an apparently dominant soil type (Eitela) was in fact a land-use term and deeper communication with farmers led them to abandon the term and propose more specific soil names.The type of question and approach taken largely determine the outcome and quality of the integration. Determining a local soil classification does not mean asking questions about soils per se: for example, plant species have been used extensively as indicators for determining the fertility status of soil (for example, Barrios et al., 2001). This research is now being used as a starting point for the development of a practical fieldbased survey procedure. This combined approach offers a possible solution to the time and cost constraint inherent in detailed soil analysis and scientific soil survey. New approaches need new tools, and researchers and extension staff would need to learn new skills to allow them to explore local knowledge without imposing their own conceptions.Adoption of improved germplasm and technology options has also been hindered for many years by the lack of coherent and delivered messages through extension services. This has been caused by a range of factors, from lack of information reaching extension agents to the wrong messages being delivered. Therefore strong linkages between farmers, extension services and research are critical to speed up information flows and diffusion of technologies. As Uganda's national agricultural research and dissemination systems embrace the principles of farmer-demand for services (both technology and development), there is clearly a need to harmonize the demand and the supply sides of information dissemination and communications (NAADS, 2003).One of the main problems facing dissemination is the format and information contained in the dissemination materials. Generally extension materials are the results of scientific research and therefore contain mainly technical considerations and often lack key information that farmers need to be able to make informed decisions on adoption and adaptation. Some of these gaps, identified by Pound et al. (2004) are the economic viability of a technology, the risk involved, the resources required to adopt the technology (land, labor, capital, materials, skills), the local availability of inputs, mechanisms for realizing the benefits of technologies at a group level, and the availability and characteristics of local and distant markets. In addition, markets and post-harvest issues, gender roles, economic benefit, risk, group organization and effective use of locally available inputs, are all examples of information that farmers need but have little access to at present.A key challenge for NAADS is to ensure that private service providers have access to and use up-to-date information and information that addresses these gaps. A key concept adopted throughout NARO's Client-oriented Agricultural Research & Dissemination (COARD) Project was \"effective and planned communication is paramount at all stages in the production, testing, adaptation and delivery of agricultural services, whether a physical technology or a management practice\" (Rees et al., 2004a).Two research projects reported here from Uganda address these needs: the COARD Project (Rees et al., 2004a) and the \"Linking demand and supply of agricultural information (Linking)\" (Pound et al. 2004) and some of their findings and those of others involved in their work are reported here (see also, Agwaru et al., 2004;Mubangizi et al., 2004). The linking project piloted in Tororo and Arua Districts identified available research and extension information, against farmer information demands, and designed an on-farm adaptive research process to generate the missing information on data such as economic benefits, risk assessment, labor considerations, input availability and markets. Comprehensive, user-friendly extension materials are then produced, incorporating the technical and socio-economic information required by extension service providers and farmers. Rees et al. (2004a), sharing the experiences of COARD, focused more on 'end-users information, media preferences and needs, and scientists' and intermediary-users' communications practices and abilities were reviewed and strengthened. Rees et al. (2004b) identified a considerable number of agencies involved in the production and sharing of information and concluded that some coordination of packaging and dissemination of research outputs is necessary. Just as most research services should be based on farmer-demand, the production of information materials on particular technologies, and the media in which they are produced, should also be based on farmer-demand to the extent possible.Butterworth et al. ( 2004) discuss the main challenges in the dissemination of research outputs based on experiences from the 'Linking' project where existing research reports were translated into extension materials that could easily be used by intermediary organizations and final end users. They outlined the process used and where farmers prioritize their constraints, and a team of scientists then tried to match these constraints with research that has already been done and translate this into fact sheets that can be used by farmers and intermediary organizations.Butterworth et al. concluded that this process was very time consuming, some research findings lacked clarity, while others lacked information that is useful to farmers or illustrations that could more easily be understood by farmers. Various reasons are advanced for this state of affairs: the relatively short project time that does not allow research teams to develop more appropriate dissemination material, the lack of a dissemination component in projects and lack of feedback. The paper contrasts the methodology used with that of COARD, where a group of scientists and extensionists came together with the backing of artists and graphic designers to develop extension materials (Rees et al.). The 'Linking' and COARD projects therefore set up a cross-institutional (NAADS, NARO Outreach Partnership Initiative, ARIS, COARD, MUK, IITA, CIAT, \"Linking\" Project) Working Group, which has developed and tested a set of headings that capture the different types of information that farmers need.In a study by Mubangizi et al. (2004), almost all the 43 private sector providers (PSPs) were male, educated up to diploma level but having minimal working experience. PSPs get information from school/college notes, books, radios, manuals, newspapers, district departments and research institutes, using manuals perceived to be the most important in both districts. There seems to be no deliberate efforts by information sources to target PSPs, while information quality assurance is lacking and/or haphazard. Constraints of private service providers in accessing and processing technical agricultural information were reported to include lack of resources, no and/or limited information sharing among PSPs and public extension staff, inadequate amount of information, unavailability of internet and difficulty in translating the information from English. Some of the main findings of these papers are:• All approaches were unable to meet the interests of the very poor, as information dissemination was not disaggregated by wealth and tended to focus on a \"one solution serves all\" approach that appears to take first priority in technology dissemination (Agwaru et al. 2004) • Reviews of farmers' information networks by wealth-disaggregated farmer groups in Soroti & Lira districts emphasized the lower access of poorer compared to wealthier farmers to government and non-government extension workers, agri-business sources and to print media (Rees et al. 2004a) • Local markets and middlemen were important sources of information by farmers in urban areas, but less so in remote areas -29% of groups in remote areas mentioned local markets as a source of agricultural information compared to over 50% in semirural and urban areas. Churches and schools were more important as information sources in remote areas, compared to more urban settings (Rees et al. 2004a) • The most frequent source of agricultural information for farmers was based around their social networks, i.e. easily accessible family, neighbors and friends (Rees et al. 2004a). • Men gave higher weight to radio and extension than women did, suggesting unequal access to these media between men & women (Rees et al. 2004a) • Little marketing information was currently available to farmers, and a considerable demand for this was expressed (Pound et al. 2004).Getting the priorities of the community clear so that the right information is given to them is of paramount information. Community priority setting therefore needs to be rigorous and take into account information needs of different groupings within the community --the resource poor, the women, the youth, etc. One of the strong points repeated in these papers is that information on technologies needs to be accompanied by other information on the requirements for the implementation of the technology --such as the cost of implementation, labor requirements and expected benefits, all of which are important in assessing its feasibility and practicality. One has to be cautious, however, as these elements may change according to location, adaptation of the technology, etc.Scaling up the impacts of agricultural research outputs has become the center of much recent debate within research and development (R&D) organizations. This concern has arisen in the context of growing concern that R&D has not demonstrated its ability to benefit large numbers of poor people across wide areas within sensible time frames. Other concerns with scaling up include: Increasing pressure from donors and civil society that money spent in R&D must brings about lasting impact on the lives of the rural poor. Many donors are demanding that the R&D projects they finance show increased impact, to ensure maximum benefits from reduced financial support to agricultural R&D. The recognition that many relevant technologies and approaches are not achieving their full potential impact because of low levels of adoption has lead to greater emphasis on the effectiveness of research to produce adoptable technological options.This section draws heavily from Menter et al. ( 2002) because there were limited case studies focusing on scaling-up in the papers reviewed. This paper summarizes the key strategies that are critical to scaling-up the impacts of Research and Development outputs.• Incorporating scaling up considerations into project planning • Building capacity • Information and learning • Building linkages • Engaging in policy dialogue • Sustaining the process (funding)• Developing an appropriate extension process to disseminate research outputsA key strategy for scaling e impact of research, scaling up must be considered from the beginning of the research and planning process. This implies building scaling up strategies into the technology development process and including them in project proposals can ensure that these considerations are given full attention throughout the life of the project. Experiences show that scaling up can be increased if key opportunities and challenges are identified at an early stage, thereby allowing key channels for scaling up research activities and development outcomes to be identified and to form an integral part of the technology/methodology development process.In order for complex innovations such as a soil nutrient management tool to be adapted and applied in a variety of different contexts, those involved need to have a good understanding of the knowledge and principles underlying the innovation. This implies rigorous capacity building of staff in local institutions and building the adaptive capacity mentioned above, within local institutions and local communities. This process often occurs implicitly in participatory research process, but needs to be made explicit in scaling up.Capacity building is an important strategy especially in the implementation and exit stage to internalize new ideas within communities, and institutions. Additionally, for farmers to be able to participate in technology innovation process and to demand technologies and other extension services, their capacity will need to be increased. Capacity in local organization, group formation, literacy skills, monitoring and evaluation are crucial if participatory extension is going to succeed. For interventions and innovations to be owned by farmers, they need to feel that they are part of these interventions --this can only happen if their capacity to participate is enhanced. Capacity building is also crucial to create a critical mass of people with skills and expertise in supporting innovation processes. It also involves building the capacity of scientific personnel and the institutional systems to sustain and replicate the process.There is need for systematic monitoring and evaluation systems at both community and institutional level to provide a credible evidence of impact. For group based and other participatory extension systems, there is need for strong local level monitoring and evaluation systems that will allow these groups, communities or CBOs to monitor and evaluate their progress, to learn and to adjust their activities accordingly. Monitoring and evaluation at community, farmer group or CBO level is also very empowering as communities become able to monitor through their community or group action plans, collect information that they need to make decisions, analyze this information and use it for making decisions. An institutional monitoring and evaluation system is not enough to serve the farmer groups and other grassroots organizations, although an institutional monitoring and evaluation system is also needed to recognize farmers' views on what they are seeking so that impact is measured from both the institutions' as well as from the farmers' perspectives. Additionally, effective impact assessment is necessary in order to learn from and gain credibility on effectiveness and extent of impact of innovations and to provide validated evidence to influence decision-makers at different levels.Engaging policy makers in an active dialogue throughout the project process is crucial for gathering support for innovations and projects, and for creating the right institutional environment for innovations to be scaled up. Policy-makers should be consulted at an early stage of the research project so as to shape the overall project design, and additionally through regular reviews of the project or at other development discussions. This type of dialogue is necessary to convince managers and encourage the changes within the institutional structure necessary to overcome the institutional barriers to change.Most scientists, after years of research effort, package their results in project reports, annual reports and other reports that are not accessible to their intended end users or beneficiaries.Information in these research reports is sometimes not specific and does not give recommendations on how the technologies should be implemented by end users. Packaging this information in ways that are accessible and can be used by the intended end users can greatly increase the adoption and use of new and improved technologies. Projects should have both research and end user dissemination as key outputs, planned from the start and with enough funds and time allocated for the dissemination component.More research is needed to understand extension processes. Different extension systems have been used to pass information and technologies to farmers, including farmer-to-farmer extension, group based extension and participatory extension. Robust and more vigorous research needs to be done to understand and learn from these processes, to define what type of technologies are suited to what type of extension methods, whether some of these methods are more exclusive than inclusive of those that most need the information and technologies.Proper problem diagnosis is a key step in extension. If the problem is not correctly diagnosed, then the recommendations will also not be right. Teams of research and extension officers and farmers should do problem diagnosis so that farmers diagnose the problems with full information provided by the researchers. It is only with full information that farmers will be able to participate in the participatory extension process.For a long time the training and visit system was the main extension method in most African countries. To carry out this method, extension officers were trained to be teachers and their main role was to teach farmers new methods of farming. With the advent of new research and extension approaches aiming at stimulating innovation, the role of the extension officer is now changing from one of a teacher to a facilitator. This changing role, however, often is not reflected in the educational institutions that are responsible for training extension officers -a notable exception being the SAFE initiative at Makerere and other universities in this region. Extension education needs to take into account this changing role in order to equip extension officers with skills that they require in order to fit into this role; such skills include facilitation, participatory approaches and social extension.Access to credit to support the intensification of agriculture and scaling-up of impacts, while long a major theme in rural development in Asia and Latin America, is increasingly being reported as a limiting factor in Africa because of the current encouragement for marketorientation among smallholder farmers. Traditionally, some small farmers have drawn on local, informal sharing arrangements such as women's saving groups, while formal credit sources (those supervised by official bodies) have generally been available only to a prosperous minority able to develop acceptable business plans and to put up enough collateral to secure a bank loan. Semi-formal A preliminary regional study (Anandajayasekeram et al. 2001) by the Farm-level Applied Research Program for Smallholder Farmers in East and Southern Africa (Farmesa) indicated that informal micro-credit for lending to smallholder farmers or entrepreneurs were \"predominantly supply-led, often originating from external donors or government rather than from local savings in the rural economy and charged interest rates below the market rates\" or even interest-free, and hence were unsustainable. Odogola et al. (2004) report on a case study in two Ugandan districts where, after identifying demand and the critical need to catalyze a savings culture and foster community-based capacity, the Farmesa partnership launched a sensitization exercise among farmers immediately followed by rigorous training in business analysis and planning.Though experience elsewhere indicated an ideal size of a community credit association as consisting of 25-35 members, the high demand for participation in other Farmesa project activities in Uganda led to formation of groups of 50-70 persons. These same groups were later taken on to form community micro-credit associations that managed funds and received constant training for its members. Over the last 6 years, membership has risen 250% to 471 persons, notably with slightly more than half being women. The calculations show that average per person savings have risen from about UGX 8550 (US$5) to UGX 32,500 (US$16), with a current loan portfolio at about three times this level and total beneficiaries nearing 2,000. Success was reported also in terms of 90% to 95% repayment rates, impact on livelihoods and reduced household and community quarrelling.Best practices for this form of savings-led credit scheme are generally similar to those for other forms of community-based organization -formation of small homogeneous groups of 5-7 persons whose members share common interests whose social capital serves as the mutual collateral for group lending; establishing a constitution and elected leadership at the level of the larger community group; full inclusion of women (who proved to be more trusted as treasurers); the development of business plans; building self-regulated procedures for loan request, committee approval and funds disbursement; participatory decision-making and transparency; agreement upon a commercially viable interest rate (15% per crop season or 30% per year); good links with district and other authorities (including formal registration)and supported at each step by the provision of plenty of training in relevant skills.It is laudable that projects such as Farmesa and the African Highlands Initiative (AHI) encourage NARS scientists to carry out action research -and not simply studies -into micro-credit as a development issue. The effects of improved credit access upon adoption of technologies in Uganda, and whether the commercial credit sector will start to become attracted to investing in smallholder agro-enterprises, has yet to be seen.NARO's experience in partnership formation is that partnerships take time to be consolidated. Quickly and loosely formed partnerships tend to depend on personalities, and disintegrate when the effective person leaves. It is important that stakeholders intending to go into partnerships first define a common goal and objectives, identify areas of conflict and/or duplication, and recognize the strength, weaknesses and expectations of each stakeholder. Special effort must be made to facilitate partnership formation for NARO. This may imply a partnership desk that (among other things) encourages the signing of MoUs, and organizes workshops with partners to identify points of convergence. Enhancement of innovation processes and partnerships is key to linking technology uses to technology developers, and agro-production to consumption. It is also an important component in NARO's research agenda (linking all five themes): this is the theme that will help maintain the right focus on actors, process and product.Greater attention needs to be given to FPR practice in the training of agricultural professionals, and experienced individuals need to be retained and included in field teams. Current trends in agricultural development emphasize innovation systems and agri-food systems, and knowledge development and dissemination perspectives. This requires systematic networks of partners with good feedback mechanisms. Partnerships are characterized by sharing of roles, resulting in increased synergy in technology development and dissemination. Working and learning together encourages the evolution of networks that enhance the flow of quality information. Partnerships also increase innovativeness by trying new and alternative ways of doing things and by amalgamating scientific technologies with farmer innovations.Global reforms have led to the redefinition of the role of government in research and increased decentralization of research activities. In Uganda the NARS reform calls for separation of research services delivery from financing, and for increased market responsiveness and client orientation. NARO has now adopted an integrated research and development approach that addresses the whole production to consumption continuum from understanding people to linking producers to markets and policies. This means increased stakeholder participation and requires strong linkages and partnerships.The effectiveness and relevance of different partners and partnership arrangements is determined, to some degree, by the type of partnerships and the way the stakeholders relate to one another. Effective partnerships may be formed with other public institutions, private sector community based organizations, non-governmental organizations and individual farmers such partnerships may also have international and regional linkages. A partnership should be an alliance among partners who agree to address a common goal, with people who are able to work together and share resources, risks and benefits. They should be willing and have mechanisms for reviewing --and if need be revising --their relationships and agreements. Following is a synthesis of two papers submitted for IAR4D. Prasad et al. (2004), reporting on a multi-stakeholder partnership through participatory research in rice breeding and seed dissemination, make good points demonstrates some qualities of good partnerships including private, public institutions and community/individual There were some obvious weaknesses as well. The partnership was formed on basis of a common need, and when the need is satisfied the partnerships may disintegrate. The partnerships were not bound by any form of agreement, and partners may not feel bound to the arrangement. The roles and obligations of each partner should have been defined. Furthermore any references to scaling up/out referred to the technology and not to the partnership. This clearly indicates that partnerships are means to a desired output --they are context/situation based, their evolution may depend on the mutual benefits, and if the benefits are insignificant or not obvious some partners may feel that they are only being used by others.The biggest challenge was maintaining the interest of the private sector: any partnership that will not result in financial gain will not interest them. Other partners need to keep this in mind.The private sector may also want to exploit other partners if they monopolize the supply side (e.g. seed multiplication in this case). Other partners should have a contingency plan or be innovative enough to go round the problem. Nagawa et al. (2004) report a partnership for soil erosion management in Bundibugyo district, Uganda, between local government, a public research institute (FORRI), an international research organization and the community. However the real partnership is between the local government and the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) who are bound by a memorandum of understanding. The partnership is demand driven in that the Bundibugyo local government requested ICRAFs help; as in the above case of rice, others were collaborators. All partners participated in stakeholder identification and in planning -important for scaling out at a later stage. The increased use of participatory methods was a key factor drawing the community into the partnership.The team had a well defined common goal which addressed the needs of the community.The core partners endeavored to build capacity of collaborators and this would ensure sustainability. The weakness is that the core partners assumed that the communities were partners by virtue of their interest in the research issue. However, this only makes them transitory participants. Both of the above cases dwelt on the problems to be solved and paid little attention to strengthening the partnerships.While farmers of different categories can be expected to have their own expectations, scientists' training and knowledge tends to lead them to another set --and Soam (2004) pointed out that in public institutions mismatch of these is quite common. Planning is therefore no substitute for intuition, experience and intelligence. Exploring the biases of researchers in their use of criteria for selecting among interventions in an Indian case study, Soam concluded that local researchers are the best judges and those most likely to give credence to farmers' preferences, although researchers working elsewhere can also make useful contributions, especially for scaling up -but only if these \"outsiders\" are sufficiently knowledgeable and experienced and if provided with relevant information from the field sites.Greater attention needs to be given to FPR practice in the training of agricultural professionals, and experienced individuals need to be retained and included in field teams.The issue of building the human and social capital of all participants in Research for Development calls for targeted training so that the research-extension-farmer linkages required can be developed and maintained. Sayer & Campbell (2001) concluded that sustained improvements to the livelihoods of poor tropical farmers require a different type of research, aimed at enhancing the capacity of the rural people to adapt to changing conditions, rather than at delivering 'finished' technologies. Clearly, farmers and communities need to be empowered to solve their own problems, and access technologies through methods that emphasize active participation and innovation (Hellin and Higmann, 2001;Sayer and Campbell, 2001). Two good examples of this are reported by Daane ad Booth (2004) and Sharma (2004). Daane and Booth (2004) summarize the experiences of the International Centre for development oriented Research in Agriculture (ICRA), the Netherlands, who in response to changing demands and expectations placed upon agricultural and rural development professionals and institutions have designed a tailored capacity building program. All of ICRA's learning programs are designed to guide interdisciplinary and inter-institutional, multistakeholders teams through a process of solving a jointly identified complex problem that cannot be effectively addressed without collective action of all concerned. This requires a serious commitment of partners and annual 28-week \"core\" learning programs, which includes a 13-week fieldwork reflects this. Due to increasing demand for their trainings they are now developing a Global Partnership Strategy linked to research and training institutions in the South. This is illustrated with an on-going collaborative initiative with NARO and Makerere University in Uganda and efforts to expand the approach to other countries of the region and to build up a sub-regional, networked capability in capacity building is targeted.An alternative approach was used in a project based training of scientists to give research scientists the skills they required in assessing clients' needs, and screening existing technologies against social equity, economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability (Sharma, 2004). Similarly to Daane and Booth (2004), practical use of these new skills was made with partners in the field and used to develop research questions and research projects.It is interesting to note that the experiential farmer learning approach used in FFS and NAADS has enabled farmers to engage in demand driven agricultural services, and thereby contribute to the success of NAADS in Soroti district. This observation concurs with earlier findings by Hagmann et al. (1999) andSanginga et al. (2001) who found that increased knowledge and understanding gained through group approaches strengthens farmers' confidence and ability to choose between options, develop and adapt appropriate solutions to their circumstances. It is argued that group approach is more effective as it promotes collective learning and exchanges that occur in group settings (Hagmann et al., 1999;Heinrich, 1993), and ensures that more people participate. Working with group may reduce the cost of delivering services and technologies to many farmers, thus making research more cost-effective, and relevant to the needs of different categories of farmers. Given the diversity and complexity of farmers' needs, the more people participate in the research process, the better the benefits should be. Kayobyo and Laker-Ojock (2004) also observed that farmers develop their capacities faster when organized into groups, and when these groups involve a significant number of women. The capacity of micro-credit associations has also grown significantly to the extent that members are now accessing much bigger loans and able to invest in more profitable enterprises, creating employments in their communities. The FFS approach has resulted in a number of process impacts, such as, enhancing bargaining power of farmers, stronger leadership, increased capacity to manage resources, including grants, and access to funding opportunities. Second-order associations for micro-credit, and second generation groups have been formed reinforcing the culture of savings and loan repayment in rural communities.Organizational and institutional change is needed in the formal R&D sector if new, demanddriven partnerships are to be output-oriented and more accountable to end-users.Competitive agricultural technology funds (CATFs) are currently seen as a promising way to encourage these objectives. Two broadly similar examples are critically reviewed in excellent papers on NARO's COARD project (Rees et al., 2004b - Increasing stakeholder involvement in decision-making and management in COARD started with broad consultation and led eventually to a management committee that included representatives of district-level public extension, the revised public extension system \"NAADS\", NGOs, the private sector and farmers organizations, as well as NARO, MakerereUniversity and a national representative. Representatives of government bodies were appointed, while others were elected through an \"Electoral College\" by secret vote, with NARO acting as observer only. Sutherland makes the point that CATFs are likely to be most useful where the available pool of R&D institutions and especially of researchers is large; these conditions did not apply in either case study, and extra measures were taken by the Nepal case to develop a peer review group that was separate from research, while Rees et al. (2004b) suggest that establishing a management unit separate from the NARI that is executing many of the sub-projects would enhance credibility of the scheme.Good practices by these case studies in ensuring transparency in decision making included scoring against merit criteria that had been previously discussed and agreed by the whole committee. Criteria should normally include consideration of prior studies of end-user demand or needs, poverty and gender orientations, environmental aspects, likelihood of successful outputs and impact, and the time frame. The use of cards minimized the risks of professionals dominating the inputs of farmer representatives on the COARD committee.Efforts by COARD to ensure accountability to clients involved ex ante assessments of the likely impact of the project by beneficiaries and implementers, and using these assessments to develop monitoring indicators. It is not clear from this paper to what extent this was followed through in developing --and then in applying --indicators in a participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) system; the intention appears to be there. Clearly one strength of the project has been the production of leaflets, brochures, manuals, posters, a video and audio cassette with participating farmers.The Nepal Government's case appears to place more explicit emphasis upon improving research reach to the rural poor and socially excluded groups than the Uganda case, and upon enhancing the research capacity of both the public and private sectors through training in proposal writing, management and implementation of projects. The Uganda case identified problems in the relatively poor and very slow financial services by rural banks, the needs of farmer groups for help to understand accounting procedures, and difficulties in getting financial staff of big organizations to adapt their customary practices to accommodate those of other partners engaged in pluralistic service delivery. It would be useful to explore which stakeholders might best address each of these constraints.As with many fashionable trends, however, CATFs that focus resources on short-term impact risk are becoming seen as panaceas. Sutherland et al. rightly draw attention to the desirability of addressing technology dissemination as an integral part of most technology development activities, rather than by developing a CATF to support a series of add-on subprojects focused on dissemination. Other aspects of the institutional incentive systems besides a CATF need to reward researchers for a client orientation and impact creation.Long and varied experience within the regional research networks of ASARECA suggests that contractual and competitive modes of funding can be complementary: competitive funding is probably best practice in changing the way of doing business, and also allows a committee to identify transparently the most reliable partnerships for contractual arrangements that tend to have lower transaction costs and fewer delays. Eventually, the success of short-term CATFs is also likely to become dependent upon a supply of outputs from longer-term research, often on far-sighted yet more elusive topics, for which contractual arrangements may still be more appropriate. Foreign donors and governments beware!After reviewing the submitted papers, from our own experiences and after reviewing the literature, we have drawn several conclusions and recommendations for how to enhance innovation systems and work in partnerships with other research and development actors for rural development.We believe that serious attention to empowering farmers is indispensable to improving the relevance, effectiveness and efficiency of current research for development systems. Farmers of all kinds need to be integrated into these systems in ways that make most use of their potential skills and complementary contributions. Like other actors in the system, they will need support to attain their potential but achieving this will not be a panacea: upstream and on-station research will still be needed, arguably more than ever, once NGOs and farmers can take on more of the adaptive research that NARS researchers are now doing.Greater attention is needed to understanding human and agroecological diversity. The implications for research programs on poverty alleviation, equity of benefits and gender issues most be addresses in research programs to enable targeting of research and development efforts, Working with farmer groups generally is more cost-effective than working with individuals, provided that appropriate methods are used. Farmers' human and social capital needs to be assessed before outsiders assume that new groups should be formed, as working with established groups has more often than not proved to be more successful. Social capital also warrants further study generally, as it affects many aspects of empowerment and livelihoods. Farmers' organizations are growing in strength and importance, and could rapidly become valuable partners in innovation systems.A market orientation in production needs to be implemented sensitively with respect to equity and gender issues. Women can become producers for the market, but may be interested in doing so with different enterprises than men. These differences must be captured and worked with by researchers. Women are better managers of micro-finance but can they maintain control of the resources and income associated with market orientation once their husbands see them earning some income?Development and uptake pathways for a technology should be defined right from the start of a research project. However, dissemination should not be seen as an add-on activity after the research is completed, research projects will need careful phasing that includes the entire technology development to dissemination continuum and maybe longer periods of funding. The program budget needs to reflect these scaling-up and scaling-out activities, including monitoring and evaluation programs for measuring impact.Ensuring that information from research is translated into forms useful for farmers and is conveyed effectively to the users should be integrated into every project and become the responsibility of every researcher and program leader. So much the better if a communication specialist is available to assist, but the lack of such a person should be no excuse. Validation and testing of these dissemination materials with development partners and farmers is also critical.There needs to be awareness of the needs and limitations of a technology, and researchers need to be prepared to catalyze some initial arrangements through partner institutions rather than leaving this as a \"policy\" issue. For example, farmer access to inputs, including credit, may have profound implications for wide adoption of a technology, especially in a marketoriented environment.We anticipate that the separation of roles between a NARI, a development agency and a farmer organization will become less distinct, due to farmers becoming better partners, as well as, to researchers and development agencies becoming concerned with and accountable for the development outcomes of their activities (rather than being concerned only with their immediate research outputs).While NARI scientists need to be directly involved in scaling-out to nearby and similar sites in order to be sure of the robustness and the limitations of a technology, they need to seek out and work with development partners with whom they can scale-up and therefore achieve much wider impact.Concern for outcomes will contribute to a more enabling environment for the creation of partnerships. However, the wider environment contains both competitive and complementary forces, and the successful institutions will be those that are ready to give up some control and share credit for success in order to achieve greater goals. Doing this will require good leadership, delegation of authority and skills in negotiation, plus a recognition by research managers that not all staff can do everything and that working in a development partnership is equal to on-station basic research in terms of delivering changes at the farm level.Empowering farmers to reach their potential requires investment, which generally should be the responsibility of development agencies, formal extension, NGOs and, increasingly, of farmer organizations themselves. However, even many NGOs and their staff still have much to learn about how best to do this, and key NARS scientists have an important role in developing, monitoring, learning and promoting these processes.Capacity building for understanding farming and social systems, collaborating with farmers and working across innovation systems is an urgent step. Biophysical scientists will need to \"let go\" of control of their technologies very much earlier, and recognize the strong and weak points of themselves and of their farmer partners. All scientists will need the ability to understand and work in teams with other disciplines, and many more scientists than at present need skills in communication and facilitation and other participatory tools. Skills building for assistant staff working most closely with farmers should not be overlooked, and is often more critical, and those staff will need more delegated authority to take joint decisions with farmers or allow farmers to take a decision.NARIs will need more social scientists -especially those with sociology and anthropology training, rather than classical agricultural economists -and governments and universities will need to assess how to make agriculture more attractive to the large numbers of social scientists who, in most countries of the region, currently go into urban and health fields.We anticipate that the demand for the products -more often prototype products -from strategic upstream research may actually increase as the effectiveness of the overall innovation system rises with increasing relevance of downstream research and identification of research needs from development and farmer group partners. So what will be the appropriate balance between adaptive on-farm and station/laboratory research? Success with farmer empowerment may enable NARS to refocus more on what they do best, particularly at the higher-technology end. NARS should also be able to devote more resources to solving longer-term and difficult problems, such as those natural resource management (NRM) challenges posed by global warming. As farmers become more important partners, however, researchers should have less recourse to trying to recreate carefully controlled farm conditions and devote more attention to working with the range of variation that characterizes much of African rain-fed agriculture (and making greater use of non-parametric methods of analysis).Whether and which kind of small farmers will be able and willing to pay for information and research services is a large issue for the future. Policy decisions will need to take account of equity issues and ensure that returns to investment in information is seen, otherwise it will not be demanded and paid for.However, institutional change is usually difficult, and nowhere more so than in the public sector. Institutional change needs its champions; and researchers typically respond best to relative freedom as to how they achieve the expected but well-defined outputs. Incentive systems for agricultural scientists remain problematic in many countries, yet developing and working within a dynamic innovation system demands retention of the best brains and the utilization of some of the accumulated experience to help guide field teams. The director who guides research, rather than administers it, should become a more common phenomenon.","tokenCount":"14312"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"0a6ba4d502d6f6adada3c4f397d65752","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/b21c83ac-5c64-4abc-8788-f52a09c0365c/retrieve","id":"1945772888"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"427eb1ee-a3cd-460a-bb64-ddd0971bf117","pagecount":"37","content":"This report on Uganda is part of a series of Working Papers on The Contribution of Livestock to GDP in the IGAD Member States. These papers were planned and commissioned by the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development's Livestock Policy Initiative (IGAD LPI). The purpose of these papers is to provide support to Livestock Policy Hubs in the Member States to use study outcomes in their engagement with PRSP processes in their respective countries to advocate representation of livestock in national strategy documents that is commensurate with its contribution to economic growth, poverty reduction and food security.The designations employed and the presentation of material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of either the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations or the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or its authorities concerning the delimitations of its frontiers or boundaries.The opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not constitute in any way the position of the FAO, IGAD, the Livestock Policy Initiative nor the government studied. This is the fifth in a series of reports on the contribution of livestock to the economies of the IGAD member states. Building on methodologies developed in earlier studies of the role of livestock in the economies of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan, the present report undertakes an assessment of the contribution of livestock to Uganda's national economy. Conventional GDP accounting may ignore some of the benefits that people derive from livestock in subsistenceoriented economies, when households directly provision themselves, when economic exchanges are not calculated in monetary terms or when these exchanges go unrecorded. The present study assigns monetary values to the non-marketed goods and services provided by livestock, and estimates the contribution of livestock to the wider national economy -as exports, as inputs into manufacturing industries, and as a component of household consumption.Official national accounts estimates are produced by the Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS).This report supports the following conclusions:1. In comparison to the other reports in this series, this analysis of the contribution of livestock to the Ugandan economy rests on a good but narrow data base. The data base is narrow because few field studies on livestock production have been undertaken in Uganda, probably as a result of decades of insecurity and civil war. It is therefore fortunate that official government data on livestock production in Uganda is both up-to-date and reasonably comprehensive. Of the four IGAD countries reviewed in this series, only Uganda has recently undertaken a national livestock census that includes pastoral livestock. Of the countries reviewed here, only Uganda will in future be attempting to base its annual livestock GDP estimates on data from regular national field surveys that include pastoral areas of the country, the twice yearly Uganda National Panel Survey (UNPS) undertaken by UBOS.2. Using 2009 as a basis for comparison, this report re-estimated the contribution of livestock to agricultural GDP. Both the original official and re-estimated figures are based in large measure on official data, but the two calculations produce substantially different results. The re-estimated livestock value added in 2009 -1,069.407 billion UShs (or about $526 million US dollars at 2009 exchange rates) -is nearly double the original official estimate of 573 billion UShs (roughly $282 million US dollars), an increase of 86.6% over official estimates for that year.3. The official and revised estimates also identify different sources for the majority of Uganda's livestock output. According to the revised estimates, cattle milk and offtake combined equal 977.526 billion UShs or about 73% of the gross value of all livestock output. In the light of these calculations, cattle are by far the most economically important livestock species in Uganda. The original official calculations paint a substantially different picture, with the majority of Uganda's livestock output coming from types of livestock other than cattle, while cattle are estimated to provide only 27% of the gross value of national livestock output. The disparity between the official and our revised assessment is due both to previously unavailable statistical data on livestock production and to the alternative computational methods used in this report to estimate the value of individual livestock products.4. According to previous official estimates, livestock contributed 1.7% to total national GDP in 2009; our revised estimates would now place this contribution at about 3.2% of the national total.To put the revised livestock contribution into perspective, it is larger than the GDP derived from either cash crops or fishing, marginally smaller than the contribution from forestry, but still only about a quarter of the value of food crop production. While livestock are vitally important to household welfare and in certain regions of the country, Uganda is not a pastoral nation on the scale of IGAD member states such as Sudan, Ethiopia or Kenya.5. In 2009 just under half -about 47% -of the direct benefits derived by livestock owners from their animals were attributable to the financially related livelihood services provided by livestock. According to conventional national accounting procedures, the financial benefits derived by livestock owners from their animals may support farming households and thereby enhance farm output, but the increases in economic productivity that arise from these services are not identified as part of the contribution by livestock to the economy. Including financial benefits, total direct use benefits derived from livestock were 2007.390 billion UShs or about $989,000,000 US dollars in 2009. This figure would have been higher if we had been able to estimate the economic value of livestock ploughing and transport services, but there was insufficient evidence to quantify the importance of these aspects of livestock production.6. The financial component of livestock output is high in Uganda because formal sector financial services are unavailable or expensive in rural areas. When the coverage provided by formal financial institutions increases and these services become more affordable, the financial component of livestock production diminishes in importance relative to the value of more tangible goods and services -milk, meat, manure, animal traction etc -as has happened in Kenya (IGAD LPI Working Paper 03-11). In sum, increasing 'normal' forms of livestock production, which are recognized in GDP accounting, is dependent, to some extent, on the provision of affordable credit and insurance for livestock owners, which permits animal owners to re-focus their production objectives on conventional types of livestock output. Until this happens, the apparent low output of Ugandan livestock will reflect, in part, the diverse and unaccounted array of services that these animals must provide for their owners.7. Livestock and livestock products constitute a small portion of Uganda's official export trade, in the period from 2006 to 2010 never amounting to more than 1.5% of all exports by value. Informal cross-border livestock trade does take place but is unlikely to significantly increase the share that livestock contribute to national exports.8. In 2009-10 average monthly expenditure for a household in Uganda was UShs 232,700 (197,500 UShs in rural and 384,350 in urban areas); food, drink and tobacco were the largest category of household expenditure, accounting on average for 45% of all expenditures (51% in rural and 32% in urban areas). Livestock food products (meat, milk, dairy products and eggs) constitute about 43% of household expenditures on food and beverages; 72% of these expenditures are in cash. 9. The production of meat and milk for domestic consumption is low in Uganda, averaging less than 11 kg of meat and about 23 litres of milk per capita per year for all Ugandans. These figures compare with an estimated availability of 41 kg of meat and 26 litres of milk per person in Sudan, and approximately 15 kg of meat and 198 litres of milk per person in Kenya.Official statistics on livestock production are more than usually important in Uganda because there are few alternative sources of quantified information on livestock. The following recommendations focus on areas of concern regarding gaps in the current, official system for the collection of data and the analysis of livestock production.1. Livestock offtake rates: The calculation of offtake rates in Uganda is complicated by the retrieval and consumption of dead animals by some livestock owners. By transforming a certain percentage of dead animals from an economic loss into an economic benefit, the consumption of fallen animals potentially has a significant impact on offtake rates, especially when livestock mortality rates are high, as they are for almost all types of livestock in Uganda. As well as asking about sales, slaughter and gifting of animals, future versions of the UNPS should enquire about the retrieval and consumption of dead livestock.2. Animal power: None of the reports in this series -on Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan or Uganda -has been able to obtain sufficient information to reliably estimate the economic importance of animal power. IGAD should consider introducing a region-wide programme of work on the prevalence and economic value of animal power usage in IGAD countries, a subject that is chronically neglected by both academic research and government agricultural monitoring systems. We also recommend that future versions of the UNPS include questions on the cost of ploughing services, the area ploughed by animal power on a rental basis, and the area ploughed by oxen owners for themselves.In Karamoja, 2.4% of the nation's population produces a fifth of the nation's livestock wealth. Attempts to estimate national livestock output are therefore highly sensitive to any defects in the data on Karamoja. Aside from insecurity in the region, two other issues complicate the estimation of Karamoja livestock production. UNPS is a household not a livestock survey and uses households rather than livestock numbers as a basis for selecting its sample. Under these circumstances, caution must be taken to ensure that Karamoja households are adequately represented since these households -though few in number -hold a disproportionate percentage of the nation's livestock. Lost or stolen livestock present another challenge. There is increasing evidence of the commercialization of livestock raiding in Karamoja, with animals being stolen in order to be marketed and transported outside the region for domestic consumption or unofficial export. Although difficult to document, these animals are part of regional livestock offtake for national accounting purposes.We recommend a specialized study of livestock production in Karamoja designed to quantify the region's contribution to national livestock output. It has been shown that returns per hectare of land in pastoral systems were 6.8 times higher than returns to ranching systems in south-western Uganda (Ocaido et al. 2009). In light of these findings, both Karamoja regional development and national livestock policy would benefit from an authoritative, evidence-based re-assessment of the value of that region's pastoral production.In estimating the livestock contribution to agricultural sector GDP we recommend that UBOS consider adopting a production-based approach to calculating the gross value of individual animal products. As demonstrated in this report, the methods used in such calculations are transparent and can be readily adjusted to accommodate fluctuations in UNPS survey data.This is the fifth in a series of reports on the contribution of livestock to the economies of the IGAD member states. The objective of this report is to assess the extent to which livestock's contribution to the Uganda national economy is reflected in national accounts, if necessary by assigning monetary values to the non-marketed services that livestock provide.The overall objective of the IGAD Livestock Policy Initiative (LPI) is to enhance the contribution of the livestock sector to sustainable food security and poverty reduction in the IGAD region. The LPI project covers IGAD member states Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda. The first report in this series examined the contribution of livestock to Ethiopia's agricultural sector GDP (IGAD LPI Working Paper No. 02 -10, 2010). Additional reports on Ethiopia (IGAD LPI Working Paper No. 02-11), Kenya (IGAD LPI Working Paper No. 03-11), and Sudan (IGAD LPI Working Paper forthcoming) expanded the scope of the original investigation to examine livestock-related economic benefits that are not conventionally considered to be part of official GDP estimates.Building on methodologies developed in these earlier studies, the present report undertakes an assessment of the contribution of livestock to Uganda's national economy. Conventional GDP accounting may ignore some of the benefits that people derive from livestock in subsistence-oriented economies, when households directly provision themselves, when economic exchanges are not calculated in monetary terms or when these exchanges go unrecorded. The present study assigns monetary values to the non-marketed goods and services provided by livestock, and estimates the contribution of livestock to the wider national economy -as exports, as inputs into manufacturing industries, and as a component of household consumption.The size of livestock's contribution to agricultural GDP is the most commonly quoted measure of livestock's role in the overall national economy and it is the starting point for this analysis. UBOS is responsible for estimating Uganda's GDP and, with respect to livestock, bases its estimates on both its own survey data and material provided by the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF).The methodology developed by IGAD for estimating the livestock component of agricultural sector GDP follows a production approach. For livestock this approach involves four stages. First, national livestock populations are estimated, in this case based on projections of national livestock populations provided by the 2008 Uganda national livestock census conducted by MAAIF and UBOS. Second, production coefficients are applied to the livestock population estimates to generate estimates of the total quantity of animal products such as milk, animals for slaughter, and manure produced by the national herd. Third, national average farm gate prices are used to assign a monetary value -the gross value of production -to total output (expressed in this case in Ugandan schillings) for each kind of livestock product. Finally, input costs (intermediate costs) are deducted from the gross value of output to derive value added, the unit in which GDP is expressed.The production approach outlined here has been used by IGAD to estimate the contribution of livestock to agricultural sector GDP in Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan and will be the basis for this study. Using this approach, initially no distinction needs to be made between production destined for commercial sale, for immediate consumption by producers, or for export. This is an advantage in a semi-commercialized economy, such as Uganda's livestock sector, in which livestock owners consume a significant portion of what their herds produce. Home production for home consumption (or for informal local exchange and consumption) is frequently unrecorded in official marketing statistics. By basing estimates on total product output, livestock GDP estimates do not rely on incomplete marketing data and should, in principle, include subsistence production. UBOS's estimation techniques do not at present correspond to IGAD's production approach. Since changes to their methodology in 2007, UBOS does not estimate the volume of output for different livestock products, does not collect farm gate prices on the sale of livestock products, and does not collect information on the intermediate costs specific to different livestock enterprises (such as cattle, sheep or goat raising). UBOS methodology was, however, closer to that of IGAD LPI prior to 2007, and is likely in the next couple of years to evolve to again resemble the IGAD methods more closely. The Uganda National Panel Survey (UNPS), currently being conducted by UBOS, is a new twice yearly household survey that includes questions on livestock production. UBOS has thus far conducted three rounds of surveys and continues to refine the methodology. The system will be finalized in 2013 and the first livestock sector GDP estimates based on the survey will be available by 2014. The first round of survey data collection is now complete and results are available (Uganda National Panel Survey, 2009/2010 (Wave I): Key Findings, UBOS 2011). UBOS and MAAIF also conducted a comprehensive national livestock census in 2008 (The National Livestock Census Report, MAAIF and UBOS, 2008), which provides authoritative, recent livestock population estimates and productivity data. Taken in combination, the 2008 livestock census and UNPS survey provide the foundation for increasingly accurate estimates of the livestock contribution to agricultural sector GDP. How to best use these resources is currently under discussion in UBOS and MAAIF, and the present consultancy is well timed to constructively contribute to this discussion.This report is divided into two parts.Part I examines what some economists have termed the 'direct use values' of livestock in Uganda. Direct use values, include the kinds of agricultural outputs that are enumerated in conventional GDP estimates -material goods such as milk and live animals for domestic consumption or export. The calculations undertaken in Part I will therefore provide a means to cross-check current Uganda GDP estimates for livestock production against a new set of estimates. Part I also examines two kinds of economic contributions made by livestock -as sources of animal power for transport or agricultural work, and as providers of financial services such as credit or insurance -that are poorly represented in standard GDP calculations organized according to international conventions. Though not exclusively, both of these kinds of economic activity tend to directly support the livelihoods of livestock owners.Part II of the report examines some of the non-agricultural contributions livestock make to the wider economy Uganda. Agricultural value added is based on the value of unprocessed or lightly processed agricultural produce at point of first sale. Some agricultural produce is consumed at this stage, but much is taken up by other sectors of the economy that use it, modify it, and add value to it. As these livestock goods and services transit through the wider economy they continue to contribute to national GDP, not in the form of agricultural output but classified now as services or manufacturing. The multiplier or indirect benefits derived from livestock in this way appear under a variety of headings in national accounts and are not readily attributed to livestock, which makes it difficult to assess the full extent of livestock's influence on the national economy. To remedy this situation and to gain a clearer understanding of the economic linkages between livestock production and the wider economy, Part II of the report examines three different ways Ugandans use livestock outputs -for private consumption, as exports, or as inputs into other domestic industries.Direct use values refer to livestock outputs in the form of goods and services, both marketed and for non-commercial or subsistence use. The concept of direct use value was developed by economists attempting to quantify the economic benefits derived from the natural environment (Barbier 1993) and has subsequently been applied to livestock (Hesse and McGregor 2006).Direct use values include but are broader than conventional definitions of Agricultural value added. Agricultural value added expresses in monetary terms the value of the goods that livestock produce -items such as live animals for slaughter and dairy products, manure, fibres, hides and skins. As long as enough of these products are traded to establish a producer price, home-produced goods that are directly consumed by livestock owners are routinely included in agricultural value added, though there may be practical difficulties in estimating the volume and value of these subsistence goods. Estimates of agricultural value added therefore include, or should include, the value of both marketed and un-marketed or informally marketed goods produced by livestock. The same cannot be said for the un-marketed services that livestock provide for their owners. For reasons discussed later in this report, the financial services provided by livestock -as credit, insurance or savings -are excluded entirely from GDP calculations, and only a part of the benefits derived from animal power are recognized, usually as contributions to transport rather than agricultural sector value added.The concept of direct use value pulls together under one heading all the various economic benefits derived from livestock -from both goods and services, whether they are marketed or for subsistence, both in the agricultural and other sectors of the economy. This is useful for an analysis, like the present one, that attempts to construct a comprehensive estimate of the economic benefits derived from livestock. The concept of direct use also includes a broad range of livelihood benefits that livestock owners depend upon in practice, but which cannot for technical reasons be incorporated into national accounts. The concept of direct use therefore provides a more balanced expression than GDP accounting of the economic reasons why livestock owners keep and value their animals. Since agricultural value added is one component of direct use value, it is nonetheless possible to compare the results of this more inclusive assessment with those based on national accounting guidelines.The following sections of Part I estimate the value of the goods and financial services provided by livestock to the Ugandan economy. To illustrate our methods of calculation, we estimate livestock output in 2009.The monetary values of meat and milk output are the main components of official estimates of the contribution of livestock to agricultural value added. We therefore begin our appraisal with an estimation of these values.Dairy output is a complex result of the interaction of multiple variables -cattle breed, the percentage of cows in the herd, the proportion of those cows that lactate per year, output per lactation, the level of extraction for human use, etc.According to the 2008 livestock census, there were 11,408,740 cattle in Uganda in 2008. 5.6% of the national herd were exotic or cross dairy breeds and 47.8% of these were cows, 32.8% of which were lactating. Based on these percentages, there were 98,000 to 100,000 lactating cows of improved breeds in Uganda in 2008 (Table 1). Also according to the 2008 census, 27.7% of the national cattle herd consisted of indigenous Ankole cattle, 65.9% consisted of zebu and other indigenous breeds, and 0.8% were exotic beef breeds. 40.5% of indigenous cattle were cows and approximately 32.8% of these were giving milk. Beef cattle produced no milk for human consumption.Overall, according to the census report, 8.5 litres of milk were produced per milked cow per week, 442 litres per cow per year, or 1.85 million litres of milk per day. If 1,519,580 cows give on average 422 litres per year, annual cattle milk production can be estimated to be 671,654,360 litres in 2008 based on published information in the 2008 census. There are marked differences in the amount of milk produced by different Ugandan cattle breeds. Table 2 provides an overview of research on the effect of these breed differences on milk output for human consumption in pastoral and farm herds. We located no research studies of onfarm milk offtake specifically from indigenous zebu breeds, the most common type of cattle in Uganda and reputedly the least productive in terms of milk output. There were 1,425,941 indigenous cows giving milk in 2008 and 97,926 improved dairy cows (Table 1); if these indigenous and improved cows produced, respectively, 508 and 1834 litres on average per annum (Table 2), total national milk production for human consumption in 2008 can be estimated at 724,378,028 litres from indigenous cattle and 179,596,284 litres from improved breeds, a total of 903,974,312 litres in 2008, an increase of about 35% over output estimates based on data in the 2008 census.There are a number of plausible explanations for this discrepancy:• Taking the unweighted mean of localized research study results is a crude method to determine national averages.• Dairy researchers tend to be drawn to areas that could potentially be developed for dairy production, thereby unintentionally inflating the apparent national level of dairy output if their work is used to construct a national average• The 35% discrepancy in output may, to some extent, represent real lost dairy output in Karamoja District as a result of the deleterious impact on pastoral livelihoods of insecurity and of intermittent government attempts at pacification (Kratli 2010;Stites and Mitchard 2011).• Milk output was underreported in the 2008 census.In this report we will base our estimates of livestock milk output on the lower range of values provided in the 2008 national livestock census.According  In 2008 there were 12,449,656 goats in Uganda, 53% of which were female. There are references to goats being milked, primarily to provide food for children among agro-pastoral and pastoral groups in northern Uganda (Okello 1985;Dyson-Hudson and Dyson-Hudson 1969;Dyson-Hudson 1966), but we could locate no information on the amount of milk that was likely to be obtained in this way or the prevalence of this practice.In eastern Africa, local goats generally produce 200-300 ml of milk/day for 60-90 days, have a kidding rate of about 150% per annum, and will only be milked if they give birth to a single kid (Peacock pers. com.). In the absence of evidence from Uganda, we assume that all female goats in Karamoja Sub-region are milked and none are milked elsewhere in Uganda, that each female produces 250 ml of milk for human consumption per day for 75 days each year, or about 19 litres per adult female per year. In 2008 there are an estimated 32,870 camels in Uganda, almost all in Karamoja Sub-Region. We located no information on the extent to which these animals were milked, but will assume for the purposes of this report that Ugandan camels produce 186 litres per annum for human consumption, which is the estimated output per head from Kenyan camels (IGAD LPI 03-11).Assuming little change in the size of the camel herd in one year and assigning camel milk the same monetary value as cattle milk, the value of camel milk production for human consumption in 2009 can be estimated as follows: 32,870 head *186 litres/head * 618 UShs/litre = 3,778,340,760 UShs or 3.778 billion UShs in 2009.Net cattle offtake in 2009 according to the UNPS Wave 1 results can be estimated to lie between 10.15% and 14.17%. Net offtake is defined here as the sum of gifts out, sales, slaughter and 20% of all deaths, less gifts in and less animals purchased, relative to opening herd size. A portion of all dead or lost animals is included in offtake on the assumption that significant numbers of fallen animals are eaten and that a proportion of stolen animals are either consumed or sold for consumption. UBOS (unpublished)   Consult 2006). Nyombi reported culling rates between 20 and 30% per annum in intensive dairy herds in the early 1990s (Nyombi 1994), and FAO estimated an 11.6% offtake rate for cattle in the early 2000s (FAO 2005). Ocaido et al. (2009) documented annual cattle offtake rates for ranches and pastoralists in south western Uganda of 21 to 28%, but these rates were elevated by a drought that led to higher than usual levels of sales during the study period.In In 2008 there were an estimated 32,870 camels in Uganda. We could locate no information on the rates of offtake or the sale price of these animals. For purposes of this calculation we will assume that the size in 2009 of the national camel herd in Uganda did not change from the census estimate in 2008 and that the offtake rate from this herd is identical to the estimated offtake from Kenyan camel herds -1.75% per annum. It should be noted that these estimations are highly sensitive to the assumed rate at which dead or lost animals are recovered, consumed and therefore become a component of offtake rather than loss. No research was available on recovery rates for fallen animals in Uganda, but because mortality rates are high, different assumed rates of recovery generate large variations in the estimated gross value of output. For example, increasing the assumed recovery rate for goats from 20% to 50% increases the estimated gross value of goat offtake from 181.913 to 233.850 billion UShs, and doing the same for sheep increases offtake from 35.380 to 54.186 billion UShs.In 2002, FAO estimated annual offtake rates for goats at 30.8% and for sheep at 36.2%, i.e., a rate broadly similar to 33% derived for goats from the UNPS data but much higher than the UNPS annual offtake rate for sheep at 22%. In south western Uganda, Ocaido et al. (2009) documented goat offtake rates of 38% (inclusive of sales, goats eaten, given out and stolen).In 2009 the annual net pig offtake rate (the sum of gifts out, sales, slaughter and 20% of all deaths, less gifts in and less animals purchased, relative to closing herd size) was 22.32% based on UNPS Wave 1 results. At this rate, a pig population of 3,280,000 head yielded an estimated offtake of 732,096 head valued at 42,198 UShs per head, totalling 30.893 billion UShs. in 2009.The estimated FAO pig offtake rate for 2002 was 82% (FAO 2005), much higher than the 22% rate derived from the UNPS survey results for 2009. On the other hand, the Uganda Programme for Trade Opportunities and Policy (UPTOP) estimated pig offtake rates of 20% (Greenbelt Consult 2006).In this report we use the UBOS estimate (unpublished) of the gross value of poultry productionmeat and eggs -in 2009: 89 billion UShs.Available evidence suggests that manure for fertilizer is not used consistently by Ugandan farmers, that it is not sold in most communities and does not have an established monetary value, which precludes its inclusion in GDP estimates. Ocaido et al. (2009) found that manure contributed to 2.7 to 4.4% of total cattle herd output from pastoral and ranch herds, respectively, but was not sold in south western Uganda. An examination of various levels of dairy farm intensification found that manure was not a binding constraint on crop production on these farms; at best, farmers used as fertilizer 15% of the manure their herds produced (Nanyeenya et al 2008). This study concluded that manure had a shadow price of zero.While it is clear that manure has an agronomic value in sustaining crop and rangeland productivity, it would seem that manure has negligible economic value for farmers given the levels of intensification characteristic of farming systems in Uganda.The following citations and quotations attest to the importance of oxen draught power in certain agro-pastoral and farming systems in Uganda, the century-long history of oxen use in some areas, and the continuing interest of various government programmes in promoting oxenization for development purposes:• In agro-pastoral areas of Soroti Distict, 'cattle herd composition was usually geared towards supporting traction with bulls and steers constituting over 36.4% of the herds (Ocaido et al 2009: 5). In this area 95% of households used bulls and steers for ploughing, transport of building materials, firewood and harvests. At the time of study in the early 2000s, the average daily hire rate for oxen was 4,000 UShs or about 2.80 US dollars per day (Ocaido et al. 2005).• In Pallisa District of eastern Uganda (Teso farming system) oxen ploughing was introduced in 1910 and flourished in conjunction with cotton farming through the 1970s. From 1985 to 1991 the cattle herd fell from 123,000 head to 2,000 due to insecurity, and cotton farming collapsed. At present, all but the poorest category of farmers owns ox ploughing equipment and at least one ox to team with another farmer for draught power (Ebanyat et al. 2010; see also Nyugo and Olupot 1999;Barton et al. n.d.).• 'In some areas like Lira and Soroti in the northeast, draught power is essential as it provides a link between crops and livestock systems. Currently, only 35% of farmers in Lira are estimated to own draught oxen -far below the levels in the 1980s. Although households with an off-farm income source have been able to restock with draught oxen, poor rural households continue to till the soil with hoes'. 'Only about 40% of households within the cattle corridor own livestock and only 5% of households own oxen for ploughing in areas where animal traction for cultivation was the mode pre-insurgency' (African Development Fund, National Livestock Productivity Improvement Project, Appraisal Report 2002: pages 11 and 12).• Maize cultivation with ox-drawn ploughs was introduced to the Sabei agro-pastoralists occupying the plains at the base of Mt. Elgon in the period before World War I (Goldschmidt 1969).• Along with food and building materials, ox ploughs were one of the incentives provided by the government to encourage voluntary disarmament in Karamoja in 2001-02 (Stites and Akabwai 2010).The national livestock census of 2008 asked livestock owners about their possession of hoes, pangas, garden forks and slashers; the census did not enquire about and contains no information on the ownership of oxen chains or ploughs. The published report from the census also contains no information on the number of oxen in Uganda that are trained or used for ploughing or haulage. As it is presently worded, the UNPS survey questionnaire enquires about ox-ploughs, but the results from this question have not yet been tabulated; the questionnaire does not enquire about the ownership or use of draught oxen or about the costs of renting ploughing services.A large ox will yield 4 litres of blood in the rains and be ready to bleed again in 5 months; dry season yields are much lower (Dyson Hudson 1966) According to the livestock census, in 2008 Uganda produced 2600 metric tons of honey; we were unable to locate information on farm gate prices for honey, and therefore cannot estimate the monetary value of honey output.The credit or financing benefits of livestock derive from the ability of livestock owners to dispose of their animals for particular purposes at a time that they choose -their ability to 'cash in' on the value of their animals as needed. This flexibility gives livestock owners access to money without the need to borrow and confers an additional financial benefit beyond the sale, slaughter or transfer value of their livestock. This additional financial benefit can be estimated as the opportunity cost of rural credit -what it would otherwise cost a livestock owner to obtain funds comparable to those produced by liquidating a part of the herd (Bosman et al. 1997). Employing this method of estimation, the additional finance value of a livestock holding is equivalent to the interest that the owners would be required to pay to obtain loans equal to the value of their livestock offtake.Research suggests that the substitution of livestock sales for access to credit is a practice actually engaged in by Ugandan farmers. Balikowa (2004) reported that the lack of capital was a significant constraint for dairy farmers, the majority of whom lacked access to credit facilities and indicated that interest rates were high. Under these circumstances, 'Many farmers fear to borrow due to uncertainty in the profitability of dairy enterprises while other[s] lack the necessary collateral security. Others prefer to sell some of the animals in order to finance the farm operations and therefore do not need to borrow from financial institutions' (Balikowa 2004: 12). Our challenge is to establish the level of financial benefit that can be reasonably imputed to the use of livestock sales as a substitute for credit.In the early 1990s in Uganda, formal lending interest rates fell from 37% to about 20-25% (Mbuza et al 1995). Average bank lending interest rates continued to decline to about 20% in the decade up to 2006 (Wabukawo 2008), and microfinance annual interest rates to farmers were 13% following a government credit scheme launched in 2006-07 (Kasirye 2007). In a recent study, Matovu and Luke (2010) found that:• the majority of informal lenders charged annual interest rates of 11-20%,• a minority of informal lenders charged more than 50% per year,• formal traditional credit sources were changing 21-30%,• but over 40% of all borrowers paid no interest whatsoever.Matovu and Luke did not attempt to estimate average rural interest rates. The Uganda National Household Survey 2009/2010: Socio-Economic Module (UBOS 2010) contains a wealth of information on credit availability and use in Uganda. Unfortunately, it contains no information on average credit interest rates in rural areas, although it did confirm that the vast majority of rural households obtain credit from informal sources (Kasirye 2007).An idea of the significance of personal lending on mean rural credit interest rates can be estimated from data in Kenya, where we do have a recent national survey that included both institutionalized (formal and informal) and private lending. In Kenya institutionalized credit interest rates in rural areas ran at about 25% p.a., although roughly half of all lending was not conducted through institutions, but was done privately among neighbours, friends and kin. When this personalized lending was taken into consideration, apparent mean rural interest rates fell from 25% p.a. to 6.3% per annum (KNBS 2006).If the situation in Kenya is any indication, it is likely that no one actually knows the prevailing average interest rate on rural credit in Uganda. In the absence of evidence, we will in this study use the rural Kenya interest rate of 6.3% p.a. The total estimated value of national livestock offtake in 2009 is given in Table 3. Part of the insurance or security value of livestock comes from the ability of owners to liquidate their own herds in an emergency. In this instance, the level of security provided to a particular individual depends on the value of that individual's assets, and livestock ownership functions as self-insurance. The value of this form of asset-based insurance can be calculated as the annual cost that herd owners would need to pay to purchase insurance coverage equal to the capital value of their herd (Bosman et al. 1997).While sound in theory, this method is difficult to implement in Uganda, which does not yet have a national health insurance scheme (Kagumire 2009;NBS Television 2011), where the formal insurance market is small, and where by 2006 only one commercial insurance company even offered health insurance (Zikusooka et al 2008). Research for this report uncovered no documented availability of formal health insurance coverage for rural Ugandans, and hence no basis on which to impute the insurance value of their livestock. Elsewhere in eastern Africa, the relevant insurance premium was estimated at 0.4848% in Kenya, 2.4% in Sudan and 10% in rural Ethiopia (IGAD LPI WP numbers 02-11, 03-11 and forthcoming). In the absence of additional evidence, we assume that insurance in rural Uganda costs 10% of the value of the coverage provided, as it does in Ethiopia where formal rural insurance coverage is also generally unavailable and insurance is instead provided by voluntary self help associations.Valuing retained livestock at 75% of the sale price of marketed animals,  For livestock owners the insurance value of livestock derives not only from their ability to liquidate their individual herds, but also from their ability to call upon assistance from fellow stock owners in time of need. These collective insurance schemes are based on the gifting and loaning of livestock within rural communities. Since transfers are in-kind -meat, milk, live animals and traction/transport services -contributions into these systems are roughly comparable to withdrawals from them. The value of the system from the perspective of resource givers and receivers is therefore approximately equal: recipients extract a level of support from the system that equals what donors are willing to contribute. The value of this communal system of livestock insurance is therefore approximately equal to the level of livestock loaning and gifting within rural communities.Table 5 estimates the value of Ugandan livestock involved in 2009 in exchanges between livestock owners. For each species excepting camels, the average annual rate at which animals are gifted from herds is taken from a preliminary analysis of the UNPS Wave 1 survey results. We assume that camels are gifted at the same rate as cattle, that small stock (pigs, sheep and goats) are disposed by their new owners within a year of their transfer, and that large stock (cattle and camels) remain in the recipients herd for three years. Based on these assumptions, the total value of livestock involved in gift exchanges in 2009 was 353.916 billion UShs, which was also the approximate value of the insurance/risk pooling benefit derived from these exchanges. The total value derived from using livestock exchanges to collectively buffer risk was 353.916 billion UShs in 2009. In comparison to the other reports in this series, this analysis of the contribution of livestock to the Ugandan economy rests on a good but narrow data base. The data base is narrow because, aside from research on cattle milk production and dairying reviewed in Section 2.2, few field studies on livestock production have been undertaken in Uganda, probably as a result of decades of insecurity and civil war. Unlike Ethiopia and Kenya, and to a lesser extent Sudan, there is no substantial, independent body of scientific or project-based research that can be used to crosscheck official figures. It is therefore fortunate that official government data on livestock production in Uganda is both up-to-date and reasonably comprehensive. Of the four IGAD countries reviewed in this series, only Uganda has recently undertaken a national livestock census that includes pastoral livestock. Of the countries reviewed here, only Uganda will in future be attempting to base its annual livestock GDP estimates on data from twice-yearly national field surveys (the Uganda National Panel Survey conducted by UBOS), rather than projections based on assumptions and indices or, as in Ethiopia, on field surveys that exclude pastoral areas of the country.Table 4 summarizes the unpublished calculations that lie behind the official 2009 estimate of the livestock contribution to agricultural GDP.  2 Estimated input costs on based on a preliminary analysis by UBOS of UNPS Wave 1 results.Both the official and re-estimated sets of calculations are based in large measure on official data, for the reasons noted above, but otherwise there is little similarity. Most obviously, the two calculations produce substantially different results. The re-estimated livestock value added -1,069.407 billion UShs -is nearly double the original official estimate of 573 billion UShs, a discrepancy that is all the more puzzling because the official estimates attribute a higher gross value to livestock output than do the revised estimates, 1789 billion UShs for the official estimate versus 1,333.307 billion UShs for the revised estimate. The two sets of calculations also identify different sources for the majority of Uganda's livestock output. According to the revised estimates, cattle milk and cattle offtake combined equal 977.526 billion UShs or about 73% of the gross value of all livestock output. In light of these calculations, cattle are by far the most economically important livestock species in Uganda. The original official calculations paint a substantially different picture, with the majority of Uganda's livestock output coming from sources other than cattle, which are estimated to provide only 27% of the gross value of national livestock output (Table 4).These conflicting results are a consequence of combining different analytical methods with different sources of data. Analytically, the revised figures are based on an attempt to estimate the quantity and value of individual animal products, and these individual values are then combined to provide an overall picture of livestock output. The official figures are, in contrast, based on indexed values ascribed to bundles of livestock products derived from individual livestock species (such as cattle) or the aggregated output of several species (as in 'goats and other animals'). In terms of data, both the 2008 livestock census results and a preliminary analysis of the livestock data in the first round of the UNPS survey were available for our revised estimates. Official estimates will not utilize these data sources until the national accounts are officially rebased. Compared to the official figures, these differences in data and analytical methods have produced an 78% increase in the estimated size of the contribution made by livestock to agricultural GDP in 2009, the year chosen for this comparison.Table 7 summarizes our estimates of the direct economic benefits obtained both from livestock products (as a portion of agricultural GDP) and from livestock services (normally not part of GDP estimates). Just under half -about 47% -of the direct benefits derived by livestock owners from their animals are attributable to the financial services provided by livestock. According to conventional national accounting procedures, these financial self services may support farming households and thereby enhance farm output, but the economic benefits that arise from these services are not identified as part of the contribution by livestock to the economy. The quantification of these benefits nonetheless contributes to a clearer understanding of the economic functions of livestock at both household and national levels. In particular, the high ratio of financial service benefits relative to other kinds of livestock production highlights the unavailability and high cost of formal financial services in rural Uganda. The cost of formal financial services determines the value to be attributed to the untraded, asset-based, financially related services provided by livestock for their owners. In Uganda, the financial benefits imputed to livestock are high because formal financial services are expensive, as they are in Ethiopia (IGAD LPI Working Paper 02-11).When the coverage provided by formal financial institutions increases in the rural areas and these services become more affordable, as has happened in Kenya, the financial component of livestock production diminishes in importance relative to the value of more tangible goods -milk, meat, manure, etc -or services -such as animal traction and transport (IGAD LPI Working Paper 03-11). In sum, increasing 'normal' forms of livestock production, which are recognized in GDP accounting, is dependent, to some extent, on the provision of affordable credit and insurance for livestock owners, which permits animal owners to re-focus their production objectives on conventional types of livestock output. Until this happens, the apparent low output of African herds will reflect, in part, the diverse (and unaccounted) array of services that these animals must provide for their owners.This final part of the report examines three different ways the Uganda economy uses livestock products -for private consumption, as inputs into other domestic industries, and as exports.In 2009-10 average monthly expenditure for a household in Uganda was UShs 232,700 (197,500 UShs in rural and 384,350 in urban areas); food, drink and tobacco were the largest category of household expenditure, accounting on average for 45% of all expenditures (51% in rural and 32% in urban areas) (UBOS 2010). The amount and kind of monthly household expenditure on livestock food items is shown in Tables 8 and 9.Livestock food products (meat, milk, dairy products and eggs) constitute about 43% of household expenditures on food and beverages; 72% of these expenditures are in cash. For other categories of expenditure that might be expected to be supported in some measure by livestock production (transport or clothing, for instance) available evidence does not allow the disaggregation of the livestock contribution.  Fluid milk from cattle, goats and camels available for consumption or processing into dairy products.In 2009 food processing accounted for 40.3% of Uganda's manufacturing value added (UBOS unpublished) and meat preparation and dairy processing accounted for 3% of all food processing. In 2009 animal feed production constituted 0.9% and leather and footwear production made up 0.6% of total industrial production (UBOS unpublished).According to an analysis of livestock export competitiveness in 2006, by that date livestock processing infrastructure -abattoirs, hides and skins processors, and dairy processing companieswere underdeveloped (Greenbelt Consult 2006).In the period from 2006 to 2010, livestock and livestock products constituted a small portion of Uganda's formal export trade, never amounting to more than 1.5% of all exports by value (Table 11). Table 12 gives the species composition of estimated unofficial livestock exports from 2008 to 2010. Source: UBOS unpublishedLivestock make a modest contribution to the non-agricultural sectors of Uganda's economy. In comparison to the other IGAD countries reviewed in this report series, livestock and their products make up a small part of Uganda's exports, the per capita production of meat and milk for domestic consumption is low, and Ugandans spend a moderate proportion of their household food budget on livestock-derived foods.While livestock are essential to the livelihoods of people in certain parts of the country, Uganda's overall economy does not depend on livestock production to the same extent as that of Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya.Aside from work done since the 1990s on dairying, little recent field research has been conducted on the performance of Ugandan livestock production systems. The reappraisal carried out in this report of the contribution of livestock to the national economy is, therefore, heavily dependent on data produced by government monitoring and statistical services. The results of this reassessment nonetheless conflict with official figures, estimating an increase of 87% above official estimates of the contribution of livestock to agricultural GDP in 2009, the year selected to make this comparison. The disparity between the official and our revised assessment is due both to previously unavailable statistical data on livestock production and to the alternative computational methods used in this report to estimate the value of individual livestock products.According to previous official estimates, livestock contributed 1.7% to total national GDP in 2009; our revised estimates would now place this contribution at about 3.2% of the national total. To put the revised livestock contribution into perspective, it is larger than the GDP derived from either cash crops or fishing, marginally smaller than the contribution from forestry, but still only about a quarter of the value of food crop production. While livestock are vitally important to household welfare and in certain regions of the country, Uganda is not a pastoral nation on the scale of IGAD member states such as Sudan, Ethiopia or Kenya.GDP estimates exclude an unusually high proportion of the direct benefits generated by Ugandan livestock. The financial component of livestock output is high in Uganda because formal sector financial services are unavailable or expensive in rural areas. At nearly half of total livestock output, the imputed value of the financial services provided by livestock in Uganda is a larger component of overall livestock output than in any of the other countries reviewed here -Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya. In Uganda in particular, conventional definitions of value added exclude from national accounts a large proportion of the economic benefits that motivate many rural people to own livestock.By misconstruing the reasons people keep livestock, outside observers may also undervalue the kinds of animals people keep. Because they provide a source of affordable credit and insurance, rural people may choose to hold animals that are durable and, hence, likely to retain their financial value, but are relatively unproductive in other, more conventional ways. Seen in these terms, conventional GDP accounting may promote a misinterpretation of the factors that motivate rural people to keep animals and obscure the circumstances that will induce them to engage in new kinds of livestock production.The production of meat and milk for domestic consumption is low in Uganda, at less than 11 kg of meat and about 23 litres of milk per capita per year. These figures compare with an estimated availability of 41 kg of meat and 26 litres of milk per person in Sudan, and approximately 15 kg of meat and 198 litres of milk per person in Kenya.These conclusions support the following recommendations:Official statistics on livestock production are more than usually important in Uganda because there are few alternative sources of quantified information on livestock. The following recommendations focus on areas of concern regarding gaps in the current, official system of data collection and analysis of livestock production.1. Livestock offtake rates: The 2008 livestock census collected information on egg, honey and milk production but, for reasons that are unclear, did not enquire about meat output in the form of animal offtake rates. This oversight is difficult to remedy through short-term studies because offtake rates fluctuate widely with variations in rainfall, and short-term studies are unlikely to provide a balanced assessment of average rates over the longer term. The regular biannual monitoring of livestock offtake in the UNPS is therefore particularly important.The calculation of offtake rates in Uganda is complicated by the retrieval and consumption of dead animals by some livestock owners. By transforming a certain percentage of dead animals from an economic loss into and economic benefit, the consumption of fallen animals potentially has a significant impact on offtake rates, especially when livestock mortality rates are high, as they are for almost all types of livestock in Uganda. We could find no documentation of the percentage of dead animals that are consumed, although this form of offtake is likely to be an important channel through which some rural Ugandans supplement their diets, especially in drought conditions in pastoral areas. As well as asking about sales, slaughter and gifting of animals, future versions of the UNPS should enquire about the retrieval and consumption of dead livestock.As it is presently worded, the UNPS survey questionnaire enquires about the ownership and rental of ox-ploughs but does not enquire about the ownership or use of draught oxen or about the costs of renting ploughing services. The rental of ploughing services can be used to establish the monetary value of ploughing by oxen, either on a rental basis or by the farmer's own animals. We recommend that future versions of the UNPS include questions on the cost of ploughing services, the area ploughed by animal power on a rental basis, and the area ploughed by oxen owners for themselves.None of the reports in this series -on Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan or Uganda -has been able to obtain sufficient information to reliably estimate the economic importance of animal power. IGAD should consider introducing a region-wide programme of work on the prevalence and economic value of animal power usage in IGAD countries, a subject that is chronically neglected by both academic research and government agricultural monitoring systems. Any attempt to quantify the economic contribution of livestock to Uganda must come to terms with Karamoja. This is not easy. The 1990-91 national census of agriculture and livestock excluded much of Karamoja 'due to the then existing security situation' (MAAIF 1993:2). Some analysts reject the 2008 Karamoja livestock census figures as too high for some north-eastern districts (Benson and Mugarura 2010), while others suspect they are too low (Kratli 2010) 1 . Aside from insecurity in the region, two other issues complicate the estimation of Karamoja livestock production. UNPS is a household not a livestock survey and uses households rather than livestock numbers as a basis for selecting its sample. Under these circumstances, caution must be taken to ensure that Karamoja households are adequately represented since these households -though few in number -hold a disproportionate percentage of the nation's livestock. Lost or stolen livestock present another challenge. There is increasing scholarly evidence of the commercialization of livestock raiding in Karamoja, with animals being stolen in order to be marketed and transported outside the region for domestic consumption or unofficial export (Eaton 2010). Although difficult to document, these animals are part of regional livestock offtake for national accounting purposes.We recommend a specialized study of livestock production in Karamoja designed to quantify the region's contribution to national livestock output. It has been shown that returns per hectare of land in pastoral systems were 6.8 times higher than returns to ranching systems in south-western Uganda (Ocaido et al 2009). In light of these findings, both Karamoja regional development and national livestock policy would benefit from an authoritative, evidence-based re-assessment of the value of that region's pastoral production.4. In estimating the livestock contribution to agricultural sector GDP we recommend that UBOS consider adopting a production-based approach to calculating the gross value of individual animal products. As demonstrated in this report, the methods used in such calculations are transparent and can be readily adjusted to accommodate fluctuations in UNPS survey data. The overall objective of the IGAD Livestock Policy Initiative is to enhance the contribution of the livestock sector to sustainable food security and poverty reduction in the IGAD region. The project purpose is to strengthen the capacity in IGAD, its member states, regional organizations, and other stakeholders to formulate and implement livestock sector and related policies that sustainably reduce food insecurity and poverty. The IGAD member states covered by the project are Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda.IGAD LPI activities in Sudan and Uganda are being undertaken in cooperation with their respective Livestock Policy Hubs (LPH) -a multi-stakeholder, advisory groups hosted by the Ministry of Animal Resources and Fisheries (Sudan) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (Uganda). The LPHs has in this context expressly asked IGAD LPI to undertake this study on the contribution of livestock to GDP in both countries and are looking to use the outcome in their engagement with Poverty Eradication Paper development process in the case of Sudan, and with the National Development Plan in Uganda. These are part of their cooperation with IGAD LPI to improve the profile of livestock in the national development strategies. This request is supported by one of the findings of the Mid-Term Review of the IGAD LPI project which established that whereas Output 1 of the IGAD LPI log frame 2 highlighted the relevance of livestock to GDP, the importance of the contribution of livestock to GDP in the countries was not adequately stressed. Furthermore, an IGAD LPI working paper has emphasised the range of services that livestock provide to the livelihoods of different socioeconomic groups. Many of these services are not marketed and it is therefore suspected that they are not currently reflected in the region's national income accounting. In response to this the IGAD LPI is commissioning studies to look at and articulate the contribution of livestock to GDP in the IGAD member states to attract the increased investment that the sector deserves. The study was initially carried out in Ethiopia with a view to replication in the other IGAD member states. The findings will ultimately be linked to ongoing in-country livestock policy development processes that are supported by the project, especially those related to the better integration of livestock in PRSP (Medium Term Plans) processes and the allocation of national resources. The findings will inform policy hub and working group meetings, and the process of allocating public funds.The study in is also anticipated to be a valuable resource to the Bureaus of Statistics. For that reason and in order to facilitate access to data, collaboration with the Bureaus through the offices of one of their staff in both countries is also anticipated.In collaboration with the Ministry of Animal Resources and Fisheries and the Central Bureau of Statistics (Sudan) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries and the Ugandan Bureau of Statistics (Uganda), the consultant will;1. assess and capture all contributions of livestock to the national economy, irrespective of whether on not current methodologies of GDP calculation cover them. This will involve satellite accounting by looking at the contribution of livestock to other sectors such as manufacturing and transport and add these values to the agricultural GDP estimates.2. provide a subsequent assessment of how far the contribution of livestock to national economy is reflected in national income accounting in the country. This will require assigning values to the non marketable services that livestock provides and familiarity with the System of National Accounts (SNA). Under this consultancy, the consultant is not required to provide an exhaustive overview of the methodologies adopted by the Bureaus.In order to address the objective of the study, and in collaboration with the Ministry of Animal Resources and Fisheries and the Central Bureau of Statistics (Sudan) and the Ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries and the Ugandan Bureau of Statistics (Uganda), the consultant will;1. Carry out a situational analysis (mainly through literature review and interviews) on how livestock is currently computed in GDP calculations within national income accounting and how and where livestock contributes to the overall economy in Sudan and in Uganda.2. Propose a methodology for the internal computation of livestock in GDP that includes assigning values to the non marketable services that livestock provides.3. Propose an approach for the assessment of the contributions of livestock to the overall economy (satellite accounting).4. Report the situational analysis findings and the proposed methodology in an inception report to IGAD LPI which will be shared with the LPHs for discussion and comments.5. Apply the proposed methodology and the approach (ideally in collaboration with a national consultant drawn from the Bureaus of Statistics) in determining the contribution of the livestock sector to national GDP and to the overall economy in both countries.6. (Ideally in collaboration with a national consultant drawn from the Bureaus of Statistics), report the findings of the study in a draft report to be presented to IGAD LPI and members of the LPHs for comments.7. Prepare a final report to IGAD LPI containing the findings of the study and a critical assessment of the application of the methodology and the approach in Sudan and in Uganda, together with any pertinent recommendations for how similar studies could be implemented the remaining IGAD Member States.8. Present findings to members of the Sudan Livestock Policy Hub. 9. Prepare up to two policy briefs for each country, and two policy briefs based on a previous study in Kenya.","tokenCount":"10084"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"6dedfa5c85b34e79de200e77e4010c77","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/4e45ea59-3716-4d78-bea4-2b56c3ab7f49/retrieve","id":"226727045"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"22841464-2765-4497-95b6-90f7f3c9bd45","pagecount":"2","content":"T he Amazon Basin contains the world's most extensive tropical forest ecosystem-and accounts for a large proportion of the world's tropical deforestation. Renewed international commitments to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) are now trying to reverse that trend, through climate change mitigation agreements that promote and incentivize conservation. Attention to REDD has recently expanded to incorporate the added targets of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+). Such initiatives have already become increasingly popular in the Amazon and other tropical forests, but significant challenges remain in ensuring the success of REDD+.The most fundamental obstacle is the information gap. REDD+ projects mandate that their planning and implementation is guided by high-quality information regarding forest characteristics, socioeconomic contexts, and trends in deforestation and forest degradation. For a region as vast, remote, and diverse as the Amazon Basin, acquiring such reliable data can be difficult. Researchers at CIAT are working to make this essential information available. Already the research center has developed a range of tools and methodologies enabling decision-makers to better monitor deforestation, estimate the sequestration effects of REDD+, and identify opportunity costs.First and foremost, the effective implementation of REDD+ requires the accurate, timely, and efficient monitoring of deforestation. This requirement poses great challenges in a region as vast and remote as the Amazon Basin. CIAT has contributed to resolving this problem by developing the online tool Terra-i, which provides near-real time, 250 m resolution data on land cover change throughout all of Latin America. Terra-i is the only land-cover change monitoring system available that provides data with good spatial and temporal resolution for the entire Amazon Basin, and has the distinct advantage of being able to provide a single objective measure of land use change across multiple countries and time periods. The data provided by Terra-i on past and current deforestation patterns can be used to estimate avoided deforestation under REDD+, assuming a businessas-usual scenario.Amazon deforestation is often caused by humans logging for valuable timber or clearing land for agriculture. Efforts to reduce deforestation can inadvertently strip people of their income sources. To address this trade-off, researchers must develop an effective method of estimating or measuring the opportunity costs of REDD+. The accurate identification of site-specific opportunity costs would enable investors to identify 'low-hanging fruit' and therefore use REDD+ funds more efficiently. This information would also provide governments and landowners with a better understanding of the costs associated with REDD+ commitments. Given the intimate link between agriculture and deforestation, it is only natural that CIAT has been at the forefront of developing the tools and methodologies to identify these opportunity costs.Designing successful REDD+ initiatives requires decisionmakers to have access to high-quality biophysical and socioeconomic information on the sites to be included in these initiatives. CIAT has increased the accessibility of this information through the development of the Amazon Initiative (IA) Viewer, an easy-to-use, online tool that provides data relevant to REDD+ for any defined area within the Amazon Basin. This data includes information on what are perhaps the three most important and difficult-to-determine variables for planning effective REDD+ initiatives: carbon storage (i.e, contribution to climate change mitigation), the likelihood of future deforestation given a business as usual scenario (i.e., risk of environmental service loss and the potential for additionality), and the opportunity costs of avoided deforestation (i.e., an approximation of the minimum payment required for forest conservation).The IAViewer helps improve the effectiveness of REDD+ in the Amazon by providing decision-makers with a practical solution to the monumental task of spatially prioritizing policy interventions within approximately 500 million hectares of potentially eligible forest. Moreover, because the IAViewer provides detailed information on biodiversity and poverty, the tool allows policy-makers to identify opportunities to bundle other environmental and economic co-benefits to REDD+ initiatives.REDD+ has great potential to drive major reductions in Amazonian deforestation, but various obstacles must still be overcome to ensure the success of this climate change mitigation strategy. CIAT is continuing to promote REDD+ in the Amazon through the development of practical tools and methodologies that provide the high-quality information required for optimal planning, implementation, and monitoring of REDD+ initiatives. As the leading research center of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS), CIAT sees great value in expanding on this work and continuing to support initiatives for Amazon conservation.","tokenCount":"720"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"6cf0aacffe05b2d8daeeb79a2187194e","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/a93a9218-3478-4024-998f-902d06682f71/retrieve","id":"-293970900"},"keywords":["Financial sustainability","household resilience","microfinance","village development fund vi"],"sieverID":"892d5447-527a-4645-9549-0a6278c09cbf","pagecount":"64","content":"Titles in this series aim to disseminate interim climate change, agriculture and food security research and practices and stimulate feedback from the scientific community.The Village Development Funds and Savings Group (VDFSG) was established in Cambodia as an instrument to enable poor families residing within Community Protected Areas (CPA) and Community Forestry (CF) establish supplementary economic activities to reduce their dependence on forest resources for their livelihood. The two main activities of this initiative are providing loans and encouraging savings among households who choose to become members of the group. This case study was conducted to generate insights on the financial sustainability of selected VDFSGs and to gather information on members' perceptions of the usefulness of these institutions in coping with household and climate change-related shocks or stresses. Financial sustainability was analyzed by conducting a detailed financial analysis of six selected VDFSGs to determine the sufficiency of interest payments as revenue to cover total costs as well as to evaluate loan recovery and equity build-up. Members' perception of the usefulness of VDFSGs in helping them to cope with and adjust to family and climate change-related shocks/stresses was determined by conducting Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) and Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) among selected representatives of VDFSG members. Useful feedback of the financial performance and areas for improvement were generated. The Pu Hong, Pu Chhob, and Prek Svay VDFSGs were considered financially sustainable based on the results of the study. The study also revealed that the VDFSGs are considered most useful when there are crop failures due to extreme weather events and when there are medical emergencies in the household. The FGD participants and key informants expressed confidence that they are in a better position to cope with their vulnerabilities due to the presence of a VDFSG in their village.It is also worth noting that women have benefitted from the financial services of the VDFSGs. The membership rosters show that there is a high percentage of women members.There is a high percentage of women among the list of borrowers from the VDFSGs. Thus, the VDFSGs encourage gender inclusiveness in terms of membership and access to credit. Some challenges were identified that limit the VDFSGs' operational capacity to provide financial support to their members. Insufficiency of funds was mentioned as a limiting factor Table 1. Formula and standards for financial metrics used in the case study .     Low-income farm households are highly vulnerable to climate-related shocks and family crises. Adverse events like crop failure due to extreme weather conditions (typhoons and droughts) as well as household emergencies such as sudden illnesses that require medical attention usually leave them no choice but to resort to costly coping strategies, such as borrowing money from lenders that charge exorbitant interest rates or selling productive assets (e.g. animals used in farming) (Moore, et al., 2019). Vulnerability stems from their lack of preparedness to cope with these unwelcome events due to lack of access to credit, low levels of family savings, and absence of crop insurance coverage (Moore et al.). The coping strategies that they resort to push them deeper into the self-reinforcing cycle of poverty (Azariadis and Stachurski, 2005). Households caught in this vicious cycle are trapped unless there is outside intervention from government or nongovernmental institutions (Marger, 2008;Azariadis and Stachurski).The establishment of community-based microfinancing institutions (MFI) has evolved to be an effective program in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty for the low-income population (Charitonenko et al., 2004). They are founded on the premise that people at the local level are in a much better position to devise and implement effective adaptation solutions to improve their condition particularly in areas concerning resilience to climate-related shocks and family emergencies (Christensen, et al, 2012;Moore et al.). Community-based microfinancing services have been established in various developing countries across the globe such as in Ethiopia, Mali, and Myanmar (Hayworth, A. et al., 2016) as well as Bangladesh and Nepal (Agrawala and Carraro, 2010), among others. This case study is a preliminary work for Objective 1 of the IDRC-funded research project that focuses on developing metrics and assessing household resilience in the Climate-Smart Villages in the Philippines, Cambodia and Myanmar. It took into account the following questions to direct the focus of the study:1) How viable is the financial model of the VDFSG in building financial assets of members?2) How do communities in CPA and CF perceive the usefulness of the VDFSGs in contributing to household resilience from climate change-induced vulnerabilities.Thus, the case study was conducted to document member perceptions regarding the relevance of the Village Development Fund and Savings Groups in managing climate-related risks and family emergencies. In addition, the study evaluated the sustainability of the VDFSGs through revenue ratios, loan repayment rates, and equity as well as members' savings growth rates.The households in the village communities of Koh Kong and Mondul Kiri provinces are relatively poor and largely dependent on the natural forest for their livelihood. Being poor often deprive them of access to even the most basic resources that are otherwise enjoyed by other sectors of society. More often, being poor is linked to many negative conditions which persist for a long period of time and repeat themselves across generations. According to Marger (2008), the vicious cycle of poverty is based on the assumption that low income rural households lack the financial resources and employable skills to increase family income (Figure 1). Lack of capital forces households to choose low risk but less productive farming technologies for fear of crop failure. These choices lead to low farm productivity, minimal farm income, and to some extent, household food insecurity. Moreover, these households, particularly those living in the forest areas are often engaged in economic activities that are harmful to the environment and leave most of the natural forest degraded or destroyed. In terms of employable potentials, low levels of education restrict their chance to hold higher paying professional or skilled off-farm employment. The occurrence of crop failure due to extreme weather events or family health-related emergencies and educational expenses give them no choice but to take unsustainable debts or to sell their productive farm assets (eg. farm land, animals used as beasts of burden).As a result of being poor, these households are vulnerable to shocks and stresses brought about by family emergencies and climate change-related events. Among the most common vulnerabilities are: crop failure, household food insecurity, family health issues, and expenses for education. In addition to climate and family-related emergencies, the COVID-19 pandemic is assumed to contribute to the stresses experienced by the low-income households. Loss of employment, restrictions on social mobility, and being sick with the virus are some of the factors that are related to the pandemic that further heighten the vulnerability of the rural households. The lack of financial resources coupled with the threat of various forms of vulnerabilities continuously trap these households in this cycle of poverty and will remain vulnerable unless there is outside intervention.The availability of village loans and savings associations have become useful instruments in addressing poverty among rural households.A village loan and savings association provides a viable option for the affected households because they can either borrow funds from the association or withdraw their savings to partially or fully meet their financial needs. The loans can be used as additional capital for agricultural production. These institutions provide the households financial security should they require their services in the future such as medical and other household expenses.They also become instruments in helping households overcome their dependence on forest resources for their livelihood by giving them the opportunity to diversify into other income generating activities such as crop and livestock production or off-farm microbusinesses.Furthermore, these institutions become useful in meeting the educational expenses of children. The VDFSG also serve as the source of social support and camaraderie among members. They are also able to benefit from seminars and trainings on various topics hosted and sponsored by the savings and loan association as well as the intellectual exchange of knowledge from each member. The VDFSG as a vehicle towards breaking the cycle of poverty also play an important role in transforming the households into confident members of the communities who are able to cope with the vulnerabilities they face. The trainings they receive from the VDFSG together with the members' support for each other are contributing factors to building the households' confidence to face risks and, thereby become resilient to many changes which affect their livelihood particularly those which pertain to climate change-related shocks and stresses.Maintaining financially sustainable VDFSGs is an important consideration in ensuring their long-term presence in the villages. According to Hollis and Sweetman (1998) \"financial sustainability of microfinance institutions is a necessary condition for institutional sustainability\". Schriener (2000) argued the same viewpoint by stating that \"unsustainable MFIs might help the poor now, but they will not help the poor in the future because the MFIs will be gone.\" Long-term presence of the VDFSGs is necessary because developing household ability to counter climate and family-related shocks does not happen overnight. It takes time for a family to improve their economic base and free themselves from the poverty trap. MFIs such as the VDFSG must continue to exist to assist poor households in attaining economic freedom.In order to achieve this goal, several indicators should be present. These include sound financial ratios on revenues, increasing total capital and members' savings, as well as high loan repayment rates. The VDFSG members are expected to make deposits in their savings accounts regularly. This would increase the capital of the associations together with the infusion of the grant and the interest payments of the borrowers. Furthermore, the members should be able to support the VDFSG through their loans and interest payments.However, aside from interest payments, the principal should be amortized religiously and paid in full when the loans mature. Principal payments are added to the loanable funds which are then available for relending. With these factors reinforcing each other, the VDFSG could attain a financially sustainable condition.  The case study focused on two important questions regarding the selected VDFSGs:1. Are the VDFSGs financially sustainable? 2. Are the VDFSGs helping their members in facing shocks/stresses brought about by extreme weather conditions, family emergencies, and the COVID-19 pandemic?Financial sustainability of VDFSGs refers to the ability of financial institutions to provide continuity of operations in the long run (Thapa et al., 1992;Kinde, 2012;Zabolotny, S. and M. Wasilevsky, 2019). This is dependent on two main considerations: 1) the VDFSGs' revenue generation to cover all their costs from operations without depending on external support or subsidy and 2) the VDFSGs' ability to keep their total capital intact. Revenue comes mostly from the interest paid by borrowers for the loans drawn from the VDFSGs.Part of the revenue is used to cover the expenses of the savings and loan associations. The remaining amount is retained and added to the Total Capital (Equity) of the associations. The Operating Self Sufficiency Ratio provided an indication as to whether the VDFSGs are \"earning sufficient revenue so as to cover [their] total costs (financial cost, operating cost, and loan loss provisions)\" (Esampally and Joshi, 2016). The VDFSGs' Revenue refers to their interest earnings from the loans of members. Financial costs are the dividends paid by the VDFSGs to their members based on the amount of savings that they have deposited while Operating Costs are the administrative costs incurred by the VDFSGs to run their daily activities. Loan loss provisions are the amount set aside by the groups from their revenue to replace loan funds that would be declared as bad debts. A value that is greater than 1.0 is an acceptable ratio. This means that Revenue is greater than total cost.Return on Equity (ROE) was measured to determine the VDFSGs' ability to build equity through retained earnings (CGAP, 2003). Equity are the loanable funds of the VDFSGs derived from members' savings, BCC project grant, and interest earnings. Net income represents the retained earnings of the groups after deducting all expenses. A ROE greater than 0.0% means that a certain amount of funds (represented by the percent value) is added to the VDFSGs' Equity. A ROE that increases over time indicates that the VDFSG is doing a good job of making its equity grow. A falling ROE indicates that the VDFSG's investments have failed to produce revenue growth, a sign that it may be in some trouble.Yield Gap compared revenue actually received with the expected revenue from loan contracts. A \"substantial yield gap (> 10%) may indicate significant past-due payments (arrears)\" (CGAP, 2003). Expected revenue is the interest of the loan for a single payment period, multiplied by the number of periods in a year.Yield on Portfolio measured how much the VDFSGs receive from their loan portfolio (ie., outstanding loans) by the way of cash from interest and fees. This is important because \"cash receipts are needed in order for the [VDFSGs] to survive, to pay for [their] operational expenses, and to continue [their] business operations\" (Mbeba, 2008). The YOP should closely approach the interest rate being charged by the VDFSGs from the funds that they loan out.Financial sustainability was also measured in the context of the VDFSGs' Total Capital (Equity) on a given time period. The initial donor funds and members' savings available at the start of the savings and loan associations are expected to have grown to include funds from the accumulated members' savings deposits and the interest earnings from the loans portfolio. As the funds grow bigger, more member-borrowers can be served. Larger amounts of funds also increase the amount of loans available per borrower.Total capital at the end of the calendar year should ideally be bigger than the previous year if the VDFSG is to continue its operation for a long time. Sustainability, therefore, can be inferred from an increasing Total Capital. The metrics that were used to examine sustainability through Total Capital were:Loan Repayment Rate (LRR) 2 is the percentage of the loan that has been paid by the borrower at a given period of time. The focus is the repayment of the principal versus the loan amount. A high percentage value implies that the VDFSG holds a large percentage of turnover funds that it can relend to borrowers that are waiting in line for the loan funds to be replenished. If a loan is nearing its due date for repayment, > 95% repayment rate is preferred over anything lower than this value.Equity Growth Rate (EGR) traces the increase or decrease of the VDFSGs' Total Capital (Equity) over time. A positive growth rate indicates that Total Capital is increasing while a negative value means that Total Capital is decreasing.Savings Growth Rate (SGR) measures the increase or decrease in the members' savings deposits. Savings is an important component of the Total Capital (Equity) because it contributes to the build-up of loanable funds. In the absence of savings, the VDFSGs would be solely drawing loan funds from donor grants and will continuously be dependent on 2 Collection rate should be a better measure of funds sustainability. It determines amount of loans actually paid against amounts that have fallen due. Unfortunately, data on uncollected due loans were not available and therefore, limited this study to use this metric. additional donor funds when demand for loans grow. This is an unsustainable practice for microfinance institutions.The formulas and measurement standards of the financial metrics are summarized in Table 1. The monthly financial records in 2020 to 2021 of the selected VDFSGs were used as data inputs in generating the financial ratios. The monthly reports included Balance sheets, Profit and Loss Statements, Cashflows, and Savings and Loans reports.Three VDFSGs in each of the two provinces of Koh Kong and Mondul Kiri (a total of six VDFSGs) were selected for the financial analysis. These VDFSGs are located in the following villages (Table 2): The effectiveness of the VDFSGs in the context of minimizing the vulnerabilities of low income households was assessed by determining the perception of VDFSG members on:1. Types of vulnerabilities (or shocks/stresses) that they experience 2. Ease of access to the services of the VDFSGs 3. Confidence in coping with the identified vulnerabilities as a result of access to the VDFSG Primary data were generated by conducting Key Informant Interviews (KII) and Focus Group Discussions (FGD). FGD meetings were conducted in two villages in Mondul Kiri (Me Pai and Pu Chhob) and three villages in Koh Kong (Prek Svay, Chhuk, and Prateal) (Table 3). There  The KIIs were conducted by phone calls in lieu of personal interviews due to the COVID-19 travel restriction that was imposed by the Cambodian government at the time that travel for the KIIs was scheduled. The names of the key informants and their role in their respective VDFSGs are presented in Table 4. The six VDFSGs that were selected for the financial analysis component of the Case Study were also represented in the FGDs and KIIs. In addition, three VDFSGs from the villages of Prai, Prateal, and Chi Kha were included as sites for the primary data collection. Thus, a total of nine VDFSGs were represented in the FGD and KII. For questions related to COVID-19 as a stressor, one village with COVID-19 cases from each of the two provinces were selected.The VDFSG's management, membership, and policies on savings and loans are presented in Box 1.Box 1. Briefer on the VDFSG's management, membership, and policies on savings and loans.Run by a 5-person committee whose members are elected from the VDFSG membership.At least one member is a representative of the CPA or the CF and there should be at least one woman in the committee.The person must permanently reside within the Community Protected Area (CPA) or the Community Forestry (CF) of the village where the VDFSG is located.He/she must be at least 18 years old with a good moral character and has a good relationship with the rest of the community.Members can deposit any amount into the VDFSG savings fund. They are encouraged to make a deposit every month and are allowed to make withdrawals from the savings but the amount should not exceed 50% of their individual savings. Those members who wish to terminate their membership from the VDFSG can withdraw all their savings.The minimum loan amount was set at KHR 100,000.00 while the maximum amount is equal to five times the amount of money the borrower has in his/her savings deposit account or 50% of the borrower's collateral value. The borrower may be charged from 1% to 2% per month as interest for the loan. A loan period of six months to two years is permitted depending on the amount of loan. Aside from agricultural and business loans, a certain amount of funds is available for household emergencies and other family expenses. Two loan repayment plans are available to the borrowers:Monthly installment (interest + principal) andMonthly interest payment and principal repayment at the end of the loan period.Brief description of the selected VDFSGsThe VDFSG in the village of Mae Pai currently has 31 members where 20 (65%) of the members are women (Table 5). The total amount of funds loaned out to members as of June 2021 was KHR 54,200,000.00 (USD 13,550.00). This was about 80% of the total loanable funds (Total Capital) which amounted to KHR 67,218,900.00 (USD 16,805). The members usually borrow loans with a repayment period of two years. Interests are paid monthly while the principal is paid upon maturity of the loans. Only a few borrowers opted to make monthly principal payments. The Pu Chhob VDFSG currently has 34 members where 59% of the members are women (Table 6). The total amount of funds loaned out to members as of June 2021 was KHR 24,154,000.00 (USD 6,038). This was about 47% of its total loanable funds (Total Capital) which amounted to KHR 40,945,700.00 (USD 10,236). Members' savings (KHR 10,787,900[USD 2,697]) contributed 26% to this fund while 74% came from the BCC Project of the ADB.Members usually borrow loans with a repayment period of two years. Interests are paid monthly while the principal is paid upon maturity of the loans. As of June 2021, the Pu Hong VDFSG has 63 registered members where 54 or 86% are women. Of the total membership, 39 (62% of total members) have an existing loan from the VDFSG and these are comprised mostly of women (Table 7).The Pu Hong VDFSG has a total capital of KHR 87,889,909.00 (USD 21,972.00) that can be loaned out to its members. Based on the June 2021 records, the total amount of funds lent to member-borrowers was KHR 35,620,000.00 (USD 8,905.00) which represents 41% of the total capital. Majority (66%) of the total capital came from the ADB grant while the remaining amount (34%) came from members' savings. The Chhouk VDFSG has 70 members where 54 (77 % of its members) are women (Table 8).Of the total number of members, 50 or 71% have on-going loan contracts (as of June 2021).Forty one or 82% of these borrowers are women.The VDFSG currently has a loan portfolio amounting to KHR 155,150,000.00 (USD 38,787.50) which represents 98% of its Total Capital of KHR 160,687,700.00 (USD 40,172.00). The latter is composed of the members' savings which has a current balance of KHR 52,017,000.00 (USD 13,004) plus the ADB grant of KHR 97,183,800.00 (USD 24,296). The Prek Chik VDFSG has 53 members where 36 (68%) of these members are women (Table 9). Thirty-two or 60% of the total membership have loan contracts with the VDFSG as of June 2021. Twenty-seven or 84% of these borrowers are women.The VDFSG has a loanable capital amounting to KHR 61,980,800.00. The funds are made up of members' savings (KHR 12,378,400.00) and Asian Development Bank (ADB) grant equivalent to KHR 43,848,800.00. Ninety-one percent of the capital funds are on loan to member-borrowers (KHR 56,277,500).  The Pu Chhob VDFSG is FINANCIALLY SUSTAINABLE. This conclusion was based on the financial metrics that were used to examine the financial condition of the VDFSG. The organization is liquid based on an OSS value of 1.3 and is projected to continue to be liquid because of a high rate of revenue collection as indicated by a low and further decreasing Yield Gap (5% in 2020 and 0.3% in 2021). Furthermore, the rates of return to equity as well as portfolio yield are high thereby ensuring that the VDFSG remain at a sustainable level of liquidity. The results of the financial analysis are summarized in Table 12. The Pu Hong VDFSG exhibits a FINANCIALLY SUSTAINABLE credit and savings operation based on the financial ratios derived from its 2020 and 2021 financial records. It has enough liquidity to cover its financial liabilities (OSS > 1.0), revenue collection is not a problem (Yield Gap < 10%, YOP = interest rate), and high as well as increasing rates of return on assets.Table 13 summarizes the result of the financial ratios used to evaluate the financial performance of the VDFSG. The financial ratios of the six VDFSGs were compared to rank their financial performance in 2020 to 2021. Ranking was achieved by assigning numerical scores from 1 to 6. A score of 1 denotes the highest performance while a score of 6 signifies the least performance. Each of the VDFSGs were given scores for their performance under each of the four financial ratios (OSS, ROE, YIELD GAP, and YOP). The scores were then summed up and divided by 4 to get the average score. The VDFSG with the lowest score gets a rank of 1 (highest financial performance) while the VDFSG with the highest average score gets a rank of 6 (least financial performance). The result of the ranking is presented in Table 17.In terms of the Operating Self Sufficiency Ratio, the Pu Hong and Pu Chhob VDFSGs were both ranked number 1 since they consistently had the highest OSS ratio in 2020 and 2021.The Me Pai and Prek Chik VDFSGs were ranked as number 2.The Being ranked as number 1 indicates that the Pu Hong VDFSG is the most financially sustainable among the six VDFSGs that were studied. The level of revenue and efficiency of collecting interest payments from member-borrowers are at the optimal level. The Pu Hong VDFSG was consistently cited by CEDAC for best management performance together with the Pu Chhob and Prek Svay VDFSGs. The criteria that were considered for the citation included in part the efficiency of members of the management committee in encouraging members to save and repay their loans on time, good bookkeeping practices and timely submission of monthly financial reports, transparency in fund management, assistance to poor members by making social funds available or food distribution, and a good working relationship with the BCC project staff as well as with the local authorities. In addition, members consider the VDFSG as their own and, therefore, they actively participate and regularly attend the monthly meetings as well as faithfully comply with its statutes. The good ratings for management performance of the three VDFSGs justify the high rankings that they obtained for financial performance.On the other hand, the Prek Chik VDFSG had the lowest rank based on its financial ratio. The ROE decreased from a high of 9.5% in 2020 to 3.8% the following year. Similarly, YOP went down from 1.5% to 1.0% while the Yield Gap rose from 8.0% to 34% in 2021. The 2021 ratios signify a serious problem in interest payment collection possibly due to the combined effect of poor management and the members' financial problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Me Pai VDFSG was ranked 5 th among the six groups on financial performance.The low ranking was brought about by its relatively poor performance in 2020. A slight improvement, however, was observed from its 2021 ratios. Despite the improvements, it is still precarious to consider the Me Pai VDFSG as a fully sustainable organization. A portion of the interest payments are used to finance the expenses of the VDFSG.Specifically, the costs items include administrative expenses, contributions to forest conservation activities, allowances of committee members, reserve funds for loan loss. After deducting the cost items from the interest payments, the balance is retained and added as part of the equity of the VDFSG. The VDFSGs mostly require a loan repayment period of two years. At the end of two years, the principal is assumed to be fully amortized together with any unpaid interest.Income from interest payments alone will not be able to sustain the operation of the VDFSG in the long run. The full payment of the principal is necessary if the VDFSG is to operate continuously for a long period of time. Funds from fully paid loans are channelled back to the pool of money to be lent again to other member-borrowers.Table 18 shows the average of the monthly loan repayment rates of the six VDFSGs for 2020 and 2021 (January to June). In 2020, The average loan repayment rate was between 0.5% to 7.2%. During the first two quarters of 2021, the average was between 0.4% to 12.9%. While all of the six VDFSGs gave positive repayment rates, the performance is still below satisfactory if the ideal rate (95% or better) is going to be used as the gauge. The VDFSG of Pu Chhob exhibited a relatively higher repayment rate at 7.2% in 2020 in comparison to the performance of the other VDFSGs. This increased further to 12.9% in 2021. The Pu Hong VDFSG followed at 6.7% in 2020 and 7.2% in 2021. The Me Pai VDFSG consistently lagged behind the five other VDFSGs. In 2020, loan repayment was only 0.5%. This further dropped to 0.4% in 2021.The VDFSG in the village of Chhouk had the largest loan exposure amounting to KHR 155,150,000.00 as of June 2021. However, its average repayment rate from January to June 2021 was precariously only 0.5%. This is alarming, considering that the 2020 figure (3%) was already low and this continued to dive in 2021. Calling the attention of the Chhouk VDFSG management committee is in order so that appropriate measures can be imposed. Similarly, the Me Pai VDFSG requires attention to avoid the risk of having bad debts.The available data did not provide information on the dates the loans were drawn and when they are due for full payment. We can only assume that the loans taken in January 2020 should be paid by January 2022 if a two-year loan will be assumed. However, after a year and a half since the loans were made, repayment should have been larger than the values that were derived. The actual repayment rates of most of the VDFSGs are less than 10% as of 2021. This indicates that with barely six months before the end of 2021, it is likely that the loans will not be paid on time or at the worst, loan defaults could happen. The non-payment of the principal means that the funds available for loans would shrink.There is a need to re-evaluate the policy of allowing a flexible principal amortization schedule. The option to pay anytime within the loan contract of two years seems to encourage borrowers to postpone principal repayments until towards the end of the loan contract thereby allowing the payables to pile up. Enforcing a monthly amortization schedule presents a more efficient system for managing loan funds. The low members' savings deposits could be a factor for the seemingly low growth rates of equity experienced by the six VDFSGs. The available data did not allow a thorough analysis of the equity of the VDFSGs since it only covered the period from January 2020 to June 2021.Based on the available information, members' deposit only grew at an average rate from -3% to 12% in 2020. By June 2021, a decrease in average growth rates ranging from -3.9% to 7% was evident.Table 19 presents the growth performance of the VDFSGs in terms of the members' savings deposits. The Prek Svay VDFSG led the other VDFSGs with an average savings growth rate of 12% in 2020. This decreased to 6% in 2021. The Pu Chhob and Pu Hong VDFSGs recorded a 9% and 7% savings growth rate, respectively in 2020 with a slight increase in 2021. The other VDFSGs experienced a negative growth rate during the third quarter of 2020. The Prek Chik VDFSG did not report any deposits during the month of July which pulled down the average growth rate to negative 14% for the July to September quarter and an average growth rate of negative 3% in 2020. The Prek Chik VDFSG's negative performance persisted until the second quarter of 2021. The Chhouk and Me Pai VDFSGs showed positive improvements in growth rates in 2021. However, their member savings performance paled in comparison to the growth rates of the Pu Hong, Pu Chhob, and Prek Svay VDFSGs.The members' deposits together with the ADB grant would fuel the operation of the VDFSGs in the long run. The savings deposits would determine the amount of loans that can be accessed by the members. The higher the savings deposits are relative to the grant, the bigger the amount of loan each member can apply for. Consequently, higher member deposits would increase the total equity of the VDFSGs. However, increased savings deposits by the members should be accompanied by application for loans by the members as well.The VDFSGs pay interest or dividends to members for their savings deposits. As such the VDFSGs should be able to invest the savings deposits through loans and generate revenue from interest payments. The interest income will compensate for the cost of maintaining the savings deposits of the members provided that the interest rate for loans is higher than the rate of dividend that are paid to members as savings depositors. This will ensure that the cost of maintaining the savings deposits is lower than the revenue generated from the loans. Ascertaining high loan repayment rates ensures that total capital (Equity) is continuously replenished to keep the financial service of lending funds to borrowers uninterrupted. The Equity Growth Rate was used to measure the increase or decrease of the equities of the six VDFSGs between January 2020 to June 2021 (Table 20).Considering all the quarterly growth rates for the years 2020 and 2021, the Pu Chhob VDFSG exhibited the highest equity growth rate among the six VDFSGs . In 2020, it registered an average growth rate of 13% versus the growth rates of the others which ranged from -1.0% to 8%. Its overall growth rate performance for 2020 to 2021 was 10%. The Pu Chhob VDFSG also had the highest loan repayment rate (2020=7.2%; 2021=12.9%) among the six VDFSGs.In the same manner, Pu Chhob also was one of the VDFSGs that had a high growth rate in members' savings. Thus, its higher equity growth can be partly attributed to its good repayment and savings performance.The Prek Svay VDFSG exhibited the second highest equity growth rate. It had the highest growth rate in members' savings in 2020 which was a major factor in that contributed to the equity growth.The VDFSG in the village of Chouk performed the least in equity growth despite the fact that it had the largest equity among the six VDFSGs. It had a negative growth rate (-1.0%) in 2020 but was able to slightly recover in 2021 showing a rate of 4% and an overall growth rate of 1.0%. The data showed that the loan repayment rate in 2020 was only 0.5% in 2021 while members' savings was only 0.3% in 2020. These things affected the equity growth of the VDFSG. Comparison of the metrics on the financial sustainability: Equity analysis of the six selected VDFSGsThe results of the Equity analysis are summarized in Table 21. The values that are presented are aggregates of the 2020 and 2021 percentages that were derived from Tables 18, 19, and 20. These were then summed up to arrive at the total percent values. The VDFSGs with a high total percent value are considered more financially sustainable over those with lower values. The Pu Chhob, Prek Svay, and Pu Hong VDFSGs exhibited higher values over the Chhouk, Me Pai, and Prek Chik VDFSGs. The result is consistent with the evaluation of financial sustainability based on the analysis of Revenue using financial ratios. Therefore, the VDFSGs of Pu Hong, Pu Chob, and Prek Svay can be considered as financially sustainable on the basis of their ability to generate revenue and the growth of their equity. The average loaned amount of each of the six VDFSGs is lower than their Equity by 5% to 24% in 2020 and by 5% to 43% in 2021 (Table 22). This implies that there are unused funds which otherwise should be earning interests if they were loaned out to members. The equity is the productive asset of the VDFSGs and, therefore, their utilization should be maximized. If they are not loaned out to members, these assets should be invested in other income generating prospects where the returns are either equal to or greater than the VDFSGs earnings from loans.  The degrees of seriousness were assigned numerical scores where a high degree of seriousness was given a numerical value of 3; Moderate degree was assigned a value of 2;while Slight degree was given a value of 1. The percentages that were presented in Figure 2 were combined with the numerical values that correspond to each degree of seriousness.Through this process, numerical scores were obtained for each type of vulnerability. These scores were used to rank the vulnerabilities. The one with the highest score was considered as the most serious vulnerability and the one with the lowest score is perceived as the least serious. Table 23 presents the result of the scoring process. Repayment of due loans was ranked as number 1 indicating that it was perceived by the FGD participants and Key informants as the most serious source of stress. Crops and livestock/poultry failure as well as Loss of job/income were both ranked as number 2. Health-related emergencies were considered as the least serious (Rank 5). There are a number of coping mechanisms in dealing with the stresses/shocks faced by households. Among those identified during the interviews was by borrowing money from banks, informal money lenders, relatives and securing loans from the VDFSG.To understand how useful VDFSGs are in helping households to cope with the stresses/shocks, the FGD participants and key informants were asked to rate the degree of usefulness of the VDFSGs to households in facing stresses/shocks. The qualitative indices and the corresponding numerical scores that were given in rating usefulness were: a) Not useful =1, b) Slightly useful = 2, c) useful = 3, and d) Very useful = 4. Based on the total scores, the results showed that VDFSGs were perceived as most useful in coping with crops and livestock/poultry failure (Table 24 and Figure 3). One-third (33%) of the respondents perceived the VDFSGs as \"Very useful\" in addressing this vulnerability while 44% considered them as \"Useful\". However, there were a small number of respondents that considered them as just \"Slightly useful\" (11%) and totally \"Not useful\" (11%). The VDFSGs were regarded as most useful to members in coping with crops and livestock/poultry failure because they have easier access to funds when they are most needed. This means the VDFSGs provide a faster service in the processing of loans and loan collaterals are waived.The VDFSGs also allow the extension of loan maturity dates when crops or livestock/poultry are seriously affected by extreme weather events or by pests and diseases. In addition, it was found that most VDFSG members borrow money and use their savings to expand agriculture production. They use the funds to buy farm inputs (eg., seeds and fertilizer), hire farm machinery for ploughing and harvesting rice, install irrigation systems, buy fruit tree seedlings (durian, rambutan, banana), and to raise livestock (pig, chicken, cow). In the past, a few members used the loans to buy or rent additional farmland. In Koh Kong, many members raising hogs borrowed from the VDFSG to increase their inventory from 1-2 heads to 3-4 heads per family. Others started commercial native chicken raising.The VDFSGs were also found most useful when there are health-related emergencies in the family (Rank 2). Thirteen percent of the respondents perceived the VDFSGs to be \"Very useful\" when there are health-related family emergencies while 63% considered them as \"Useful\". The interviewees noted that each VDFSG keeps a cash reserve (KHR 1 to 2 Million) for lending to members who need cash for family emergencies such as in cases of illnesses, accidents, childbirth, death and funeral ceremony. This practice is highly appreciated by members and is a key factor in attracting villagers to join the savings group.The VDFSGs were ranked 3 in usefulness when loans from lending institutions become due.More than half (56%) of the respondents perceived them as \"Useful\" while 11% rated them as \"Very useful\". However, there were respondents who considered the VDFSG to be \"Not useful\" (11%) or just \"Slightly useful\" (22%) in facing their liquidity problem when loans become due. This perception would apply to persons whose loans come from other MFIs/banks. They cannot apply for a new loan until they have fully paid their existing due loans.The VDFSGs' usefulness was ranked lowest in meeting shocks due to loss of jobs or other sources of income. While 57% rated them as \"Useful\" in coping with this vulnerability, 29% considered them to be \"Not useful\" while 14% perceived them as \"Slightly useful\". This is understandable considering the fact that people would hesitate to apply for a loan if they have no capacity to repay their loan since they have lost their jobs.There were more respondents who perceived that the VDFSGs are just \"Slightly Useful\" (56%) for expenses related to children's education. This perception exceeded those who consider them to be \"Useful\" (22%) and \"Very useful\" (11%). About 11% considered the VDFSGs as \"Not Useful\" in pursuing their children's education. Those who borrowed funds used the loans to pay for school fees, buy books and school supplies, and to pay for transportation particularly for sons and daughters who are studying in a university or high school that are located at a far distance from home (e.g. schools in provincial towns or capital city). When face-to-face classes were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some families used the loans to buy smart phones so that their children can attend online classes.Although currently not many families use the loans from VDFSGs for educational purposes, the members believe that the VDFSGs would be helpful in financing their children's higher level education in the future. Aside from access to loans, some of the members aim to use the money that they are saving with the VDFSGs for their children's university education.  It is also worth emphasizing that a high percentage of VDFSG members are women. This is an indication that VDFSGs provide access of their services to both men and women of the community.In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the VDFSGs served as a support system to their  Superimposing these reasons with the members' perception of the usefulness of VDFSG validated the results of the FGDs and KIIs. The respondents ranked \"Crop and livestock/poultry failure\" as the main concern in which VDFSG loans are most useful. The loan applications from 2018 to 2021 showed that majority (73%) of the reasons given by the members for borrowing funds from the VDFSGs were related to \"Crop and livestock/poultry production\" (Table 26). Next to crop and livestock/poultry failure, the VDFSGs were also considered useful in the areas of \"Health-related expenses, food insecurity, children's education, as well as for starting a microbusiness\". These concerns, taken together, appear as 27% of the reasons why the members applied for loans. During the years covering the COVID-19 pandemic, starting a microbusiness was used as a coping mechanism by several members who were laid-off from work or lost other sources of income. Repayment of loans did not appear as a reason for applying for a VDFSG loan because members are not allowed to apply for new loans if they still have an outstanding loan with the association. a) The vulnerabilities of poor rural households in Cambodia include, in descending order of perceived seriousness are: lack of liquidity to repay due loans; crop and livestock/poultry failure, loss of jobs or other sources of income; lack of funds for children's education; food insecurity; and health-related expenses;b) The usefulness of VDFSGs in coping with these shocks/stresses were ranked as follows (in descending order): Crop and livestock/poultry failure, Health-related emergencies, Food insecurity, Repayment of loans, Expenses for children's education, Loss of job and income.c) The VDFSG usefulness was highly appreciated during the COVID-19 pandemic.People applied for loans or tapped their savings deposits when family members lost their sources of income due to company lay-offs and/or prolonged lockdowns. The borrowed funds were used to buy food supplies or to start microbusinesses to replace their lost jobs. When face-to-face classes were cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some families used the loans to buy smart phones so that their children could attend online classes; and d) The FGD and KII respondents believe that there is a high level of confidence among VDFSG members that they are in a better position to cope with their vulnerabilities due to the presence of a VDFSG in their village. This indicates that VDFSG members are more resilient to possible stresses/shocks since they have access to financial and social support from VDFSGs.It is also worth noting that women have benefitted from the financial services of the VDFSGs. The membership rosters show that there is a high percentage of women members.Furthermore, the financial records show that there is a high percentage of women among the list of borrowers from the VDFSGs. Thus, the VDFSGs encourage gender inclusiveness in terms of membership and access to credit.The viability of the VDFSGs as perceived by the communities in terms of the assistance they provide to its members cannot be ignored. In fact, these communities have relatively the same vulnerabilities and have identified similar coping mechanisms as well. They believe","tokenCount":"7330"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"7ab0d34e063569476a0ab078484b7e68","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/9208ec6d-48d1-4f28-be58-5be8b99263fe/retrieve","id":"-1686254171"},"keywords":["Desmodium","dry heat","genebank standards","physical dormancy","seed germination","Stylosanthes","viability test"],"sieverID":"04662f28-fccc-4d1e-9612-bd7524590a17","pagecount":"19","content":"Mechanical scarification with a scalpel is the best treatment to break physical dormancy and reach high germination percentages in many legumes. However, it is highly time-consuming. Given the ecological relationship between the presence of physical dormancy and high temperatures in tropical grasslands, dry heat treatment could also promote breaking of physical dormancy in Desmodium and Stylosanthes species. This study assessed seed germination of several accessions of nine species of Desmodium and Stylosanthes. Seeds were treated with dry heat (80°C for 30 minutes) and scarified with a scalpel to determine whether dry heat is a reliable alternative treatment to overcome physical dormancy. Mechanical scarification with a scalpel was effective and resulted in high germination for all species. In S. guianensis, both treatments had an equivalent effect, making dry heat a feasible alternative. Dry heat could also be a reliable alternative in D. heterocarpon, D. velutinum, S. hamata, and S. scabra, but tetrazolium tests may be necessary to confirm viability. For D. barbatum and D. scorpiurus, dry heat could be an alternative but further research is needed to confirm this, while in S. capitata and S. viscosa dry heat is not a reliable alternative.Desmodium spp. and Stylosanthes spp. are key tropical forage crops with a wide distribution from the humid to semi-arid tropics (Williams et al., 1984;Chandra, 2009). Several species of both genera are herbaceous plants adapted to tropical dry woodlands, natural savannas and grasslands (Stace and Edye, 1984;Baskin and Baskin, 2014). They are extensively used by the livestock sector due to their adaptability to infertile, acid soils and stressful climatic conditions. In addition, Stylosanthes spp. have high nutritional value (Burt et al., 1983;Lascano, 1991;Santos-Garcia et al., 2012), while Desmodium spp. are beneficial as intercrops for soil recovery (Khan et al., 2008). Seeds of several Desmodium and Stylosanthes species exhibit physical dormancy (PY), which is a major difficulty when assessing viability in genebanks and is also responsible for inefficient crop establishment (Mott and McKeon, 1982;Anand et al., 2011). High environmental temperatures are closely related to the breakdown of PY and seed germination of these tropical legumes (Mott et al., 1981;McKeon and Mott, 1982;McKeon and Brook, 1983;Veasey and Martins, 1991). A study of the response to high temperatures is not only important for a better understanding of Stylosanthes and Desmodium germination ecology, but also to improve the use of seeds and to manage seeds more efficiently in genebanks.The seed coat of Desmodium and Stylosanthes species has a palisade layer of compressed macrosclereid cells that have high concentrations of hydrophobic compounds, (Serrato-Valenti et al., 1993;Castillo and Guenni, 2001) which cause impermeability (Baskin et al., 2000). This is expected since both genera belong to the Fabaceae (subfamily Papilionoideae), one of the 18 angiosperm families with PY (Baskin et al., 2000;Gama-Arachchige et al., 2013). As in all families with PY, there are specialised structures (water gaps) in the seed coat of legumes that are sensitive to physical environmental signals such as high temperatures or highly fluctuating temperatures (Baskin et al., 2000;Baskin, 2003). In Papilionoideae, the lens is the \"signal detector\" by which seeds become permeable and able to germinate during the most favourable conditions after the dry season (Lersten et al., 1992;Serrato-Valenti et al., 1993;Morrison et al., 1998;Baskin andBaskin, 2000, 2014;Baskin et al., 2000;Baskin, 2003;Burrows et al., 2009;Jaganathan and Liu, 2014;Jaganathan, 2015Jaganathan, , 2016)).Field and laboratory experiments have demonstrated the importance of high temperatures for the germination of seeds of Stylosanthes spp. and Desmodium spp. Field research with S. hamata, S. scabra, S. humilis and S. viscosa have found that temperatures above 50°C are required to achieve a high proportion of seedling establishment (Mott et al., 1981;McKeon and Mott, 1982;McKeon and Brook, 1983;Nicolaeva et al., 1985). In Desmodium spp., temperatures close to 40°C reduced the number of hard seeds (Veasey and Martins, 1991). In addition, there are a range of artificial treatments for breaking PY, including acid scarification, microwaves, percussion with hot plates, hot water, dry heat and mechanical scarification with sandpaper or a scalpel (Mott, 1979;Erasmus and Pieterse, 2001;Bhatt et al., 2008;Burrows et al., 2009;Anand et al., 2011;Chaves et al., 2017). Mechanical and acid scarification are the most effective treatments in a wide range of legume species (Silveira and Fernandes, 2006;Clifton-Cardoso et al., 2008;Perez-Garcia, 2009;Pereira and Ferreira, 2010;Wang et al., 2011;Baskin and Baskin, 2014). However, these procedures are risky and/or time-consuming. The CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture) genebank has a viability standard of 70%, i.e., seed lots in storage should have at least 70% viability and seeds are sampled for viability testing every 5 -10 years. The average rate per trained person for conducting mechanical scarification with a scalpel in the Seed Viability Laboratory at CIAT is 30 accessions (with 100 seeds each) per person in one working day. Heat treatments that mimic natural habitat effects and disrupt the lens structure could offer an alternative, practical method for overcoming PY in seeds of Stylosanthes and Desmodium species. There is some evidence that dry oven heat (75-85°C) increases the germination percentage in some Stylosanthes species (Gilbert and Shaw, 1979;Mott and McKeon, 1979;Nicolaeva et al., 1985); there is less literature about the effect of dry heat on the germination of Desmodium species, but a similar response is expected since some are adapted to grasslands.In the present study, we aimed to establish if dry heat treatment (80°C for 30 minutes) is a reliable alternative to mechanical scarification with a scalpel in viability tests of key Desmodium and Stylosanthes species, and whether sowing between paper (BP) or on top of paper (TP) has any influence on the effect of these treatments. To address these objectives, three experiments were carried out and the proportions of normal and abnormal seedlings, and hard (not able to imbibe water), fresh (able to imbibe water but without germination) and dead (rotten/mouldy) seeds were analysed. Seeds were treated with dry heat or by scarification with a scalpel and sown with BP and TP techniques.Seeds of Desmodium barbatum (CIAT accession number: 23527), D. heterocarpon (23303), D. scorpiurus (43266), D. velutinum (23272), Stylosanthes capitata (2536) and S. guianensis (165) were used in this experiment. These accessions had been vacuumpacked in aluminium bags and stored at 5°C at the Genetic Resources Program (PRG) in CIAT, and originated from Mexico, Indonesia, Australia, Brazil and Colombia (table 1).A sample of 1,200 seeds was taken for each accession. Each sample was divided among six paper bags corresponding to the combination of two sowing methods, between paper (BP) and on top of paper (TP), and three treatments (control, mechanical scarification, and dry heat). Paper bags were placed at room temperature (25°C) for one week. During this time, seeds from two of the paper bags were mechanically scarified with a scalpel, by making a small cut on the testa on the opposite side to the hilum. Two other bags with seeds inside were placed in a preheated oven at 80°C for 30 minutes and then returned to room temperature. The temperature and duration of the treatment were determined from preliminary experiments with small samples of D. heterocarpon, D. velutinum and S. capitata seeds using temperatures from 70 to 90°C and periods of 10 to 60 minutes: 80°C for 30 minutes was the treatment that consistently generated high percentages of normal seedlings in all species (unpublished data). No treatment was given to the seeds from the two remaining bags (control). For each treatment, four replicates of 50 seeds were either rolled in saturated germination paper (BP) or sown on the top of saturated filter paper in Petri dishes (TP), according to ISTA BP and TP methods (ISTA, 2020). The Petri dishes were randomly placed inside a germination chamber with a photoperiod of eight hours with white light at 35°C and 16 hours of darkness at 20°C. The BP rolls were packed in pairs inside plastic bags with holes and randomly placed inside a basket, which was then put inside the same germination chamber where the Petri dishes were placed. BP rolls were watered once per week, while the Petri dishes were watered every two or three days as they lost moisture faster.The numbers of normal and abnormal seedlings, and hard (impermeable), fresh (permeable but not germinated) and dead (rotten) seeds, were recorded 7, 14 and 21 days after sowing. Seedlings with an intact axis, cotyledons, and stem, without any irregularity in shape or colour were considered normal (ISTA, 2020). Counts were summed and the total numbers were used in the analysis described below.In this experiment, 10 accessions from each of D. heterocarpon, D. velutinum, S. capitata and S. guianensis, with varying storage periods and originally collected from 11 different countries (table 2), were assessed to compare the germination of seeds treated with 30 minutes of dry heat at 80°C against seeds treated with mechanical scarification with a scalpel. Seed lots of these accessions had been vacuum-packed in aluminium bags with between 4 and 8% moisture content and conserved in the long-term storage room (-18°C) at the Genetic Resources Program in CIAT. For each accession, 320 seeds were sampled and divided into two groups, then placed at room temperature (25°C) for one week. Seeds from one group were scarified with a scalpel (mechanical scarification) and seeds from the other group were given a dry heat treatment as described for experiment 1. Treatments were represented by five replicates, three of them had 20 seeds and the other two 50 seeds. Each replicate was sown in a 90 mm-diameter Petri dish (TP procedure) as explained in experiment 1. Petri dishes were randomly placed within a germination chamber with photoperiod of eight hours with white light at 35°C and 16 hours of darkness at 20°C. The same data collection protocol described in experiment 1 was followed in experiment 2.Based on the results of experiments 1 and 2, it was decided to more broadly evaluate whether the current CIAT protocol could be replaced by a simpler, less labour-intensive method. The current CIAT viability-testing protocol consists of scarifying with a scalpel the seeds and then sowing them between paper sheets, while the alternative protocol involved applying dry heat (80°C for 30 minutes) to seeds and then sowing on top of paper. Current and alternative protocols will be referred to as 'scalpel' and 'dry heat' treatments. Germination of 10 accessions of S. capitata, 25 accessions of S. hamata, 43 accessions of S. scabra and 12 accessions of S. viscosa (table 3) were evaluated by using the current CIAT viability protocol and the alternative protocol. Seed lots, after drying, had been conserved at -18°C since 2006. For each accession, 200 seeds were sampled and placed in two paper bags (100 seeds in current CIAT protocol group and 100 seeds in alternative protocol group). Bags were placed at room temperature (25°C) for two weeks. Then dry heat and mechanical scarification treatments were applied, and the seeds were sown on top of paper (TP) and between paper (BP), following the procedure explained in experiment 1 (ISTA, 2020). Dry heat treatment was represented by four replicates of 25 seeds sown in Petri dishes, while scalpel treatment was represented by two replicates of 50 seeds sown in two paper rolls.Data obtained in this study did not match normal-distribution and homogeneity-ofvariance assumptions, which is quite common in germination data (Hay et al., 2014;Gianinetti, 2020). Inaccurate use of statistical methodologies like ANOVA (Sileshi, 2012;Gianinetti, 2020) was thus avoided and instead a Generalized Linear Model for binomial family data with logit link function was fitted using R (Dunn et al., 2018). This modelling approach considers the variable number of seeds that were used in the different experiments (necessary for logistical reasons). The occurrence of over-dispersion was determined by comparing the values of both residual degrees of freedom and the Pearson statistic against the GLM model deviance. In cases where over-dispersion was detected, the GLM model was adjusted to a quasibinomial GLM. Wald tests were implemented to calculate the statistical differences among treatments when the GLM model did not require adjustment, while an F-test was used in those cases where the quasibinomial GLM model was required (Dunn et al., 2018).Experiment 1 A significant (P < 0.001) effect of pre-sowing treatment on the proportion of normal seedlings was observed for each species when the three treatments (control, dry heat and mechanical scarification with a scalpel) were considered together (table 1). The percentage of normal seedlings from non-treated (control) seeds was always less than that of dry heat-and scalpel-treated seeds (figure 1). Control seeds had high percentages of nongerminated seeds, most of which were hard seeds. When only dry heat and mechanical scarification treatments were considered, the differences became less pronounced, and in D. velutinum and S. guianensis, the treatment effect was not significant (table 1). In D. barbatum, D. heterocarpon, D. scorpiurus and S. capitata, there was a significant effect of treatment, with normal percentages of mechanically scarified seeds always greater than that of dry heat-treated seeds. Meanwhile, only S. guianensis had a significant effect of sowing method (BP or TP) on the percentage of normal seedlings. However, this significance was lost when only dry heat and scalpel treatments were considered, which means that the difference between sowing methods only occurred in the control group, with a higher normal percentage in the TP method (figure 1). Seeds of D. heterocarpon and S, guianensis treated at 80°C and sown using the BP method showed wide variation in contrast with those sown on TP.Dry-heat and mechanical-scarification treatments showed different effects among the species. A significant effect (P < 0.001) of pre-sowing treatment on the proportion of normal seedlings was observed in all accessions of D. heterocarpon. Scalpel treatment resulted in > 90% normal seedlings for all ten accessions (figure 2). Meanwhile, dry heat had differential effects between accessions. For seven accessions, dry heat gave normal seedling percentages above 70% (23902, 23628, 13105, 13137, 3667 and 23618; table 2). Accessions 13515, 13651 and 13129 showed hard-seededness in several seeds; very few seeds were dead or abnormal with dry heat and scalpel treatments. Accessions 23902, 23628 and 23618 are notable cases, presenting high percentages of normal seedlings in both treatments despite 29, 32 and 32 years of storage, respectively. These three accessions are the oldest seed lots used in the entire study.For D. velutinum, accessions 23995 and 23272 had > 95% normal seedlings regardless of whether the seeds had been subjected to the dry heat or scalpel treatment (i.e. no significant difference; figure 2, table 2). The remaining eight accessions showed significant differences, with scalpel-treated seeds having higher germination than dry heat-treated seeds. For accessions 33464, 13212, 33003 and 23991 the scalpel treatment had the highest percentages of normal seedlings, although the dry heat treatment always exceeded 70% of normal seedlings. In accessions 23320, 13697, 23319 and 33353, the oven treatment did not result in 70% of normal seedlings while scalpel treatment always resulted in > 80% normal seedlings. These accessions showed high proportions of nongerminated seeds, which were mainly hard seeds, when treated with dry heat.Four accessions of S. guianensis (1605, 10482, 1553 and 2100) showed significant differences in normal seedlings between treatments, but both treatments gave percentages of normal seedlings above 90% (figure 2, table 2). None of the other S. guianensis Table 1. Information on the accessions of Desmodium and Stylosanthes species used in experiment 1, with the statistical significance (P) of the effect of sowing method and pre-sowing treatment on the proportion of normal seedlings. Accessions were stored at 5°C after drying. P-values are given for the statistical significance considering all three treatments (control, scarification with a scalpel and dry heat) and considering only two treatments (without control). accessions had a significant difference in the percentage of normal seedlings between the two treatments, and it was always above 90%. For three S. capitata accessions (1019, 2054 and 2246), there was no significant difference between treatments (table 2). Accessions 1019 and 2054 showed normal seedling percentages above 70%, but 2246 had normal percentages below 50% in both dry heat and scalpel treatments, with considerable proportions of dead/abnormal seeds and non-germinated seeds (figure 2), which were mostly fresh. Accessions 12291, 11568 and 1924 showed a statistical difference among dry heat and scalpel treatments (table 2), with higher percentages of normal seedlings after the scalpel than the heat treatment. Nonetheless, dry heat treatment resulted in percentages of normal seedlings > 75%. In accessions 2246 and 2666, both dry heat and scalpel treatments resulted in low proportions of normal seedlings (< 40%) with high percentages of fresh seeds (figure 2). There were significant differences between treatments, with dry heat presenting the lowest percentages of normal seedlings (table 2). There were again differences among dry heat and scalpel treatments for accessions 2220, 1914 and 12750, with normal seedling percentages following scalpel treatment always reaching the > 70% while dry heat treatment resulted in < 70% of normal seedlings. In these three accessions, there were high percentages of fresh seeds in these three accessions for both treatments.Accessions 22020 and 1914 also had dead seeds with dry-heat and scalpel treatments.     3). For these accessions, normal percentages were above 70% in both treatments. The six remaining accessions showed a significant effect of treatment (P < 0.005; table 3). Seeds of accession 12126 treated with dry heat produced normal seedling percentages greater than 80%, while scalpel-treated seeds did not reach the 70% threshold (figure 3). Scalpel treatment showed higher percentages of normal seedlings than dry heat in accession 12747, but dry heat-treated seeds still achieved percentages > 75%. In four accessions (12735, 12737, 12751 and 12173), dry heat-treated seeds did not reach the 70% normal seedling threshold, while scalpel-treated seeds did. Accessions 12737 and 12751 presented non-germinated seeds (mainly fresh), while accessions 12735 and 12173 had many dead and abnormal seeds with dry heat. Out of 25 accessions of S. hamata, 14 showed no effect of treatment on the percentage of normal seedlings (table 3), with high normal percentages following both treatments (figure 4). The remaining accessions showed significant differences, two of them having higher normal seedling percentages with dry heat than with scalpel treatment (12023 and 11208). Accessions 11786, 167 and 2770 had higher percentages of normal seedlings with scalpel treatment, but dry heat treatment always exceeded 70% normal seedlings (figure 4). Accession 12513 had a high percentage of normal seedlings following scalpel treatment, but not after dry heat treatment, where there were many non-germinated seeds (mainly fresh). High percentages of fresh seeds were also found in accession 11583, but this accession had higher percentages of normal seedlings than 12513. In four accessions (121, 141, 1010 and 142), dry heat treatment resulted in dead seeds and abnormal seedlings.CIAT 12126 CIAT 12181 CIAT 12746 CIAT 12734 CIAT 12747 CIAT 12748 CIAT 12737 CIAT 12735 CIAT 12173 CIAT 12751 Normal seedlings Hard and fresh seeds Abnormal seedlings and dead seedsF igu re 3 1.0 0.9 0.8 0.7 0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0 Figure 3. Final proportion of normal seedlings (dark green), hard and fresh seeds (light green), and abnormal and dead seeds (red) in germination tests applied to seeds from ten accessions of S. capitata following two treatments: 1) dry heat at 80°C during 30 minutes and sown on top of paper (Dry heat); and 2) mechanical scarification with a scalpel and sown between paper (Scalpel). Seeds were incubated with alternating temperatures of 35/20°C with a photoperiod of eight hours light during the warm phase/16 hours dark during the cool phase for 21 days.Of the 43 accessions of S. scabra evaluated, 27 showed no significant difference in normal percentage between the dry heat and scalpel treatments and this percentage always exceeded the 70% viability threshold (table 3). Six accessions (2108, 2099, 1083, 1434, 1092 and 1096) with a significant effect (P < 0.005) of treatment on normal seedling percentage showed higher percentages of normal seedlings with dry heat treatment than with scalpel (figure 5). Meanwhile, six accessions (2075, 10156, 1293, 1946, 2637 and 1088) showed a significant effect of treatment and higher percentage of normal seedlings following scalpel treatment than with dry heat; nevertheless, dry heat treatment always exceeded the 70% threshold. Accession 1381 also showed a significant effect of treatment, but with both treatments the threshold was reached; in dry heat some fresh seeds remained. In three accessions, dry heat treatment resulted in low normal percentages compared with scalpel treatment (always > 70%). Accessions 1055 and 2121 showed persistence of hard-Figure 4. Final proportion of normal seedlings (dark green), hard and fresh seeds (light green), and abnormal or dead seeds (red) in germination tests applied to seeds from 25 accessions of S. hamata following two treatments: 1) dry heat at 80°C for 30 minutes and sown on top of paper (Dry heat); and 2) mechanical scarification with a scalpel and sown between paper (Scalpel). Seeds were incubated with alternating temperatures of 35/20°C with a photoperiod of eight hours light during the warm phase/16 hours dark during the cool phase for 21 days.CIAT 141 CIAT 11583 CIAT 1010CIAT 142 CIAT 12513 CIAT 11206 CIAT 11794 CIAT 11786 CIAT 12447 CIAT 167 CIAT 11208 CIAT 12442 CIAT 10583 CIAT 2770CIAT 121 CIAT 12440 CIAT 1453CIAT 11776 CIAT 1936CIAT 11781 CIAT 2858 CIAT 12023 CIAT 12455 CIAT 11797   CIAT 1055 CIAT 2377CIAT 1271CIAT 1086CIAT 1946CIAT 66 CIAT 10659 CIAT 2637CIAT 10088 CIAT 1381CIAT 2086CIAT 1068CIAT 2121CIAT 1047CIAT 2339CIAT 2111CIAT 10156 CIAT 2308CIAT 2478CIAT 2681CIAT 1928CIAT 2164CIAT 1293CIAT 2574CIAT 1092CIAT 10581 CIAT 2003CIAT 1096CIAT 2507CIAT 10614 CIAT 1077CIAT 1995CIAT 2089CIAT 2108CIAT 2143CIAT 10623 CIAT 2099CIAT 2796CIAT 10037 CIAT 1083CIAT 2075CIAT 10669 CIAT 1434 Proportion of seeds or seedlings  seededness while accession 2377 had high proportion of fresh seeds. Accession 1271 was the only one that showed many dead seeds or abnormal seedlings with dry heat. Six accessions (2255, 2001, 2060, 2118, 2123, and 9) did not show a statistical difference between treatments in the percentage of normal seedlings, and both were always being above 70% (table 3, figure 6). However, the remaining six accessions did have significant differences between treatments, with dry heat-treated seeds never reaching the 70% threshold. These showed high percentages of hard and fresh seeds.Figure 6. Final proportion of normal seedlings (dark green), hard and fresh seeds (light green), and abnormal or dead seeds (red) of germination tests applied to seeds from 12 accessions of S. viscosa following two treatments: 1) dry heat at 80 °C for 30 minutes and sown on top of paper (Dry heat); and 2) mechanical scarification with a scalpel and sown between paper (Scalpel). Seeds were incubated with alternating temperatures of 35/20°C with a photoperiod of eight hours light during the warm phase/16 hours dark during the cool phase for 21 days.The results of this study indicated high percentages of hard-seededness in seed lots of the evaluated species. Mechanical scarification with a scalpel was found to consistently be the best treatment for overcoming the physical dormancy in all nine species, as previously demonstrated for other legume species (Silveira and Fernandes, 2006;Clifton-Cardoso et al., 2008;Perez-Garcia, 2009;Pereira and Ferreira, 2010;Wang et al., 2011;Baskin and Baskin, 2014). However, this type of scarification, especially for tiny seeds, demands a lot of staff time for viability testing, causing a bottleneck when working with thousands of accessions in a genebank. This study has confirmed the observations of previous studies that a dry heat treatment also has a positive effect on seed germination of Stylosanthes spp. (Mott et al., 1981;McKeon and Mott, 1982;McKeon and Brook, 1983)  and highlighted the potential for the use of dry heat treatment in routine viability testing as an alternative to mechanical scarification. This would increase the throughput of viability testing as at the CIAT genebank, one person can simultaneously apply dry heat treatment to 120 accessions (with 100 seeds each) by using two ovens, with no labour required, other than sampling the seeds and putting them in labelled paper bags. The cost reduction from using dry heat, does however depend on the species as the dry heat effect varied among species and, in several cases, differed from the effect of scarifying seeds with a scalpel. Dry heat treatment generated similar percentages to the maximum viability obtained in seeds mechanically scarified with a scalpel in all evaluated accessions of S. guianensis. This is a particularly important species in the forages collection of the CIAT genebank, represented by 1,486 accessions. Dry heat at 80°C for 30 minutes was also a reliable alternative for S. scabra, which is represented by 777 accessions in the CIAT genebank. However, fresh seeds are expected in some accessions of S. scabra, and therefore dry heat must be complemented with a tetrazolium test to confirm maximum viability percentages in those cases where there are still fresh seeds at the end of the germination test. The tetrazolium test is also a costly procedure, but according to results in S. scabra it would be expected that a small proportion of seeds of a few accessions may require it. Therefore, in overall terms, it is probable that even when tetrazolium tests are required, a saving in time and resources will be achieved by using dry heat instead of mechanical scarification with a scalpel in the monitoring of viability of S. scabra accessions. The great majority of S. hamata accessions also showed satisfactory viability percentages with dry heat, but for this species, more accessions are expected to be susceptible to high temperatures than for S. guianensis or S. scabra. There are 361 accessions of S. hamata in the CIAT genebank. Meanwhile, mechanical scarification with a scalpel gave high percentages of viable seedlings in most of the evaluated accessions of S. capitata and S. viscosa, but dry heat treatment was efficient only in approximately half of their accessions. Thus, dry heat treatment is not a suitable alternative for viability monitoring purposes in these two species. The use of tetrazolium in these cases is expensive since it would be needed for many accessions, and for high proportions of the tested seeds.For D. heterocarpon and D. velutinum, the results also suggested that dry heat is an alternative to mechanical scarification with a scalpel. However, some proportion of hard seeds remained in a few accessions. Therefore, for confirming the maximum viability tetrazolium tests could be an option to complement dry heat treatment. Both species are represented by 601 accessions at CIAT genebank. For D. barbatum and D. scorpiurus, where only one accession was assessed, dry heat resulted in high percentages of normal seedlings as did mechanical scarification with a scalpel. Thus, dry heat is a potential alternative to mechanical scarification in these two species, but more experimentation is necessary with larger representation at the accession level.In this study, no significant difference was found between sowing methods (BP or TP) when dry heat and mechanical scarification with a scalpel were applied to Desmodium and Stylosanthes spp., except for control seeds of S. guianensis. Thus, since sowing seeds on top of paper has many operational benefits (e.g. to constantly monitor the progress of germination, reusability of dishes and the availability of light for seedlings to grow more vigorously (Baskin and Baskin, 2014), it is proposed to use this methodology instead of between paper as ISTA suggests for seeds of D. intortum (Mill.) Urb. and D. uncinatum (Jacq.) DC. (with sulphuric acid scarification), S. guianensis, S. hamata, S. humilis Kunth and S. scabra (ISTA, 2020).These findings have important implications for laboratories working with the evaluated species, given that dry heat reduces the time spent in pre-sowing treatments that break PY. It is suggested that for accessions of D. heterocarpon, D. velutinum, S. guianensis, S. scabra and S. hamata, dry heat treatment should be used for the initial test soon after harvest and first viability monitoring test, or for every monitoring test until the germination of a certain proportion of accessions from the same harvest fails to reach 70% normal seedlings which is the regeneration standard for wild varieties of the CIAT´s forages collection (when a new seed lot is produced to represent the accession in the genebank). Additionally, these results have relevance for the tropical livestock sector. Physical dormancy has already been identified as a major factor limiting crop establishment (Mott and McKeon, 1982;Anand et al., 2011). Mass mechanical scarification methods have been employed, but they tend to generate large quantities of damaged seeds (Baskin and Baskin, 2014).","tokenCount":"4694"}

data/part_5/0398142522.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"a83fc5409633dc161c0e7d1261271037","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/83346c3c-8a29-46a6-9bfb-de1eeb1d8a74/retrieve","id":"-1981045991"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"e678046f-2cc9-49af-bba2-7cb4462d4391","pagecount":"4","content":"Leveraging the informal dairy sector for health and wealth: An impact narrative from Kenya and Assam Did you know?Nearly 800,000 farmers and 28,000 milk vendors depend on the informal milk chain in Kenya.Each day, informal traders handle nearly 2 million litres of milk, providing nourishment to 6.5 million Kenyans.Policy change to license and certify milk vendors in Kenya has benefitted the economy by around USD 33 million annually and the economy of Guwahati, the capital of Assam, by USD 6 million annually.Training, licensing and certification has measurably improved milk hygiene, safety, and business performance.In the first year of operation 20% of traders were on the path to certification. By 2013, about 70% of producers and traders in Assam's capital district had been trained and of those, 86% were reported to have made changes in milk production practices.The Kenyan economy benefited by an estimated USD 33.5 million annually since 2008 from research to inform policy change in Kenya's dairy industry.The research resulted in licensing for small-scale milk vendors who previously were not officially recognized and were frequently harassed.The benefits of policy change include improved safety of milk, increased profit margins for small-scale vendors, greater access to milk for poor consumers, and employment for many others in the sector, with knock-on benefits for the wider economy.Building on the Kenyan approach, an initiative to improve milk handling among traders in Assam in India resulted in a new governance institution, increased risk mitigation, improvements in milk quality, higher sales and increased customer satisfaction. The economic impact in the capital district has been estimated at USD 5.6 million annually.Smallholder farmers produce the majority of fresh milk consumed in most developing countries and informal sector hawkers and traders provide most of this milk to consumers.While smallholder farmers have received some support from governments and NGOs, informal sector trad-ers typically get no support and are even penalized. This is often driven by beliefs that the trade in raw milk is a danger to public health and compounded, in many cases, by opposition from the formal sector, in order to reduce competition from informal traders. Informal actors are also vulnerable to exploitation because they rarely have a collective voice and often lack business knowledge and an understanding of technologies.In Kenya, the milk value chain is dominated by small-scale milk vendors and producers, with informal milk marketing accounting for nearly 86% of raw, unpasteurized milk supplies to consumers. Prior to 2004, however, government dairy policies essentially criminalized the activities of smallscale milk vendors.The informal dairy sector in Assam, India, faced similar problems and was viewed as unsafe and backward, despite providing around 97% of milk marketed.An approach to working with the smallholder-based dairy sector, first developed in Kenya and later extended to Assam, integrates a number of different approaches.Firstly, it quantifies the importance of smallholders and informal trade for economies, employment, women and consumers. Secondly, it provides evidence for policymakers on the safety of the informal sector in comparison to the formal sector and the risks to human health. Thirdly, the approach provides training in hygienic milk production and business skills to demonstrate how these can impact on milk safety and business performance.Fourthly, it begins the process of 'formalizing' the informal sector through training and certification, and/or by developing platforms that bring together the regulators and informal producers and marketers. The intervention also ensures that incentives for the informal sector to improve hygiene are in place; and finally, it demonstrates the benefits gained by the informal sector through the capacity building, formalization and incentives.In Kenya, these approaches were implemented through the Smallholder Development Project (funded by the UK Department for International Development), which generated research-based evidence to reveal the economic significance of the informal milk sector and highlight the potential for improved handling and hygiene practices.Key among this information generated was that: 86% of marketed milk passed through informal hands; the traditional sector was an important source of employment (with nearly 800,000 farmers and 28,000 small-scale milk vendors depending on the milk chain); processed milk from the formal sector showed no significant difference in quality compared with milk from unlicensed traders; informally-traded milk provided farmers with a better price and consumers with a cheaper product; and training significantly increased awareness of milk vendors and quality of milk.These findings attracted the interest of government agencies.Research evidence played a major role in changing attitudes and practices in the dairy sector, as it offered a wholly new paradigm of dairy market development. The evidence was wide-ranging, relevant, highly robust and credible, making it difficult for opponents to refute. It was also strategically communicated to a range of audiences and showed clear ways forward for policymakers.Another key part of the Smallholder Development Project's policy-influencing strategy was to identify and foster links with civil society organizations, who lobbied decisionmakers and parliamentarians for support, resulting in an increased profile for the small-scale milk vendors and widespread acceptance of their importance in the dairy industry. Consequently, the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries Development issued a set of dairy industry regulations in September 2004 designed to streamline licence application processes for small-scale milk vendors.Officials from the Kenya Dairy Board (KDB) used the impetus of these new regulations to institute training, certification and licensing requirements for small-scale milk vendors. This resulted in more emphasis on bringing traders into the regulatory system and supporting them to sell quality milk, rather than attempting to stamp out smallscale marketing channels. To improve customer confidence, KDB began branding milk outlets and also trained and employed business development service providers to train and certify small-scale milk vendors, and worked with NGOs to encourage milk consumption.The revised 2004 policy allowed small-scale milk vendors, who had operated illegally due to concerns over safety of the milk they supplied, to improve their milk handling and hygiene, operate more efficiently, on a larger scale, and thus significantly reduce transaction costs (the cost of milk marketing declined by 9% after the introduction of the revised policy), increasing their profit margins. The policy change is now benefiting the economy by at least USD 33.5 million per year, with nearly half accruing to producers, many of whom are women. Other benefits include increased employment, greater access to milk for consumers, safer milk and improved nutrition of poor consumers.'Things have changed a lot. Before, we (milk traders) were enemies of all the regulatory bodies, the police, KDB, the public health inspectors. But now we have come together, we have been trained on milk hygiene and value addition. We are able to check the quality of the milk we buy from farmers and what we sell on.There has been a drastic reduction in milk rejected by customers. We feel proud of the milk we are delivering to the consumers.'Virginia Wamaitha, Katito milk traders group.Building on the success of the Kenyan dairy approach, ILRI supported an initiative in Assam, India, to improve milk handling among milk traders. This involved liaising with traders' organizations, building their trust, developing a platform where traders could come together with other actors, developing a training and certification program for producers and traders, and ensuring incentives were in place for compliance.The project was able to convincingly demonstrate the importance of the traditional sector, its positive role in improving milk quality and its potential to support pro-poor development.This evidence significantly contributed to a dramatic shift in the attitude of government officials towards the informal dairy sector. For example, before the project, the Dairy Development Department (DDD) had not been involved in any initiatives to improve the hygiene and quality of milk marketed by the informal sector. Latterly, DDD has not only endorsed the informal sector but has become the spearhead for the training and certification program and begun to fund some activities.More widely, government stakeholders came together for the first time to collectively discuss and solve problems in the informal milk marketing sector. The formation of the Joint Coordination and Monitoring Committee brought together all relevant government departments enabling them to dovetail departmental initiatives towards a common cause. For example, the Guwahati Municipal Corporation-responsible for issuing trade licences and regulating the milk trade-agreed to adopt trader-friendly licensing and inspection procedures. Meanwhile, the Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Department organized free health check ups for producers, and the Department of Health Services offered health check ups for milk traders.The training and certification scheme for informal milk producers and traders was developed collaboratively. After receiving training on causes of milk spoilage and disease, hygienic milk production, and handling and storage, trainees formed Hygienic Milk Monitoring Committees to monitor the adoption of improved practices. Successful adopters were then provided with certificates and a business licence.By 2013, about 70% of producers and traders in and around Guwahati had been trained.Of those trained, 86% reported to have made changes in milk production practices after training, including increased hand washing, cleaning of milk containers, use of hygienic utensils and proper disposal of milk. Producers reported reduced incidence of disease and increased milk productivity and income, while traders reported reduced milk spoilage, higher milk quality, and increased milk shelf life, demand, consumer satisfaction, sales and profits.Estimates of economic benefits show that the program has seen increased average profit margins (up by USD 0.01 per litre) for trained traders. In the district of Kamrup, for example, it has been estimated that the project has added USD 13,000 every day to the value of the informal dairy sector (~ USD 5.6 million annually).The smallholder dairy model has widespread applicability to the informal sectors of developing countries where most milk, meat, fish, eggs and fresh vegetables are produced by smallholders and sold in live animal markets.The broad approach has generated evidence of the importance of the informal sector and its ability to deliver safer food, followed by influence and advocacy to create a more enabling environment for the informal sector.An important strategy was developing sustainable institutions to give a voice to informal sector actors and to support training, certification and licensing.The approach is being extended into other countries and other food sectors and ILRI is gathering further evidence to support scaling up and scaling out. ","tokenCount":"1674"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"3db61bae18f02c876f5d0f35ddb41c4c","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://repository.cimmyt.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/93f5a4ca-8d6d-4cae-8630-a84e3a798717/content","id":"1593670454"},"keywords":["Africa","Drought","Molecular breeding","SNP","Rapid cycle recombination","Testcross evaluation"],"sieverID":"06ab0a05-e5df-4c28-928c-81446b511c5f","pagecount":"13","content":"A marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) program was undertaken in sub-Saharan Africa to improve grain yield under drought-stress in 10 biparental tropical maize populations. The objectives of the present study were to evaluate the performance of C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids obtained after three MARS cycles (one cycle of recombination (C 1 ), followed by two generations of selfing (S 2 ), and to study yield stability under both drought-stress (DS) and well-watered (WW) conditions. For each of the 10 populations, we evaluated hybrids developed by crossing 47-74 C 1 S 2 lines advanced through MARS, the best five S 5 lines developed through pedigree selection, and the founder parents with a single-cross tester from a complementary heterotic group. The hybrids and five commercial checks were evaluated in Kenya under 1-3 DS and 3-5 WW conditions with two replications. Combined across DS locations, the top 10 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids from each of the 10 biparental populations produced 0.5-46.3 and 11.1-55.1 % higher mean grain yields than hybrids developed using pedigree selection and the commercial checks, respectively. Across WW locations, the best 10 hybrids derived from C 1 S 2 of each population produced 3.4-13.3 and 7.9-36.5 % higher grain yields than hybrids derived using conventional pedigree breeding and the commercial checks, respectively. Mean days to anthesis of the best 10 C 1 S 2 hybrids were comparable to those of hybrids developed using the pedigree method, the founder parents and the commercial checks, with a maximum difference of 3.5 days among the different groups. However, plant height was significantly (P \\ 0.01) different in most pairwise comparisons. Our results showed the Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (Maize, a staple food in many sub-Saharan African countries, is grown by millions of resource-poor smallholder farmers. Between 2009 and 2011, maize was grown on more than 25 million hectares in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) (Shiferaw et al. 2011), accounting for 7.5 % of global production. Average maize yield in SSA is 1.8 Mg ha -1 , which is significantly lower than the yield in other maize-growing regions in the developing world. Recurrent drought is one of the major abiotic stresses in SSA, with approximately 22 % of mid-altitude/subtropical and 25 % of lowland tropical maize growing regions affected annually (Heisey and Edmeades 1999). Drought is expected to increase in severity due to the changing climate. Therefore, development and deployment of tropical maize germplasm with relevant agronomic and adaptive traits is key to enhance the food security and livelihoods of maize farming communities.The ability to quickly develop germplasm with resistance to important abiotic and biotic stresses will be critical to the resilience of cropping systems in the face of climate change. Conventional breeding methods have a proven track record of improving tolerance for abiotic stresses (DTMA 2015). However, progress in breeding for drought tolerance using conventional approaches can be slow due to the polygenic nature of most stress-related traits, requiring accumulation of several quantitative trait loci (QTL) into adapted genetic backgrounds. In order to uncover and characterize genomic regions or QTLs associated with drought stress, several researchers (Veldboom and Lee 1996;Ribaut et al. 1997;Tuberosa et al. 2002;Almeida et al. 2013;Semagn et al. 2013) have reported a number of QTL for grain yield and other traits under both drought stress and well-watered conditions. In most cases, however, individual QTLs for highly polygenic traits explain only a small proportion of the phenotypic variance, and are highly dependent on genetic background and environmental conditions (Semagn et al. 2013).Molecular marker-assisted breeding, including marker-assisted backcrossing (MABC), marker-assisted recurrent selection (MARS) and genomic selection (GS), in combination with high-throughput and precise phenotyping, doubled haploidy and yearround nurseries, can significantly accelerate the development of climate resilient maize germplasm (Prasanna et al. 2013;Xu et al. 2012). MARS is a breeding approach that aims to accumulate favorable alleles for a relatively large number of QTL in a given population using a subset of markers that are significantly associated with target traits (Bernardo 2008). GS incorporates all available marker information into a model to simultaneously predict genetic values of breeding progenies for selection, enabling accumulation of favorable alleles for major and minor QTL through multiple generations of recombination (Meuwissen et al. 2001). Recently, Beyene et al. (2015a) and Semagn et al. (2015) reported genetic gains achieved through GS and MARS in 8 and 10 tropical biparental maize populations, respectively. These studies involved genotyping 148-300 F 2:3 (C 0 ) progenies with 190-286 markers, evaluating testcrosses under WW and DS conditions and advancing selected lines using GS and MARS. In both studies, each population was represented by seed bulks containing equal amounts of seed of C 0 , C 1 , C 2 , C 3 , parents, F 1 s, and lines developed via pedigree selection. Five commercial checks were included for comparison. Beyene et al. (2015a) compared GS with pedigree selection across eight biparental tropical maize populations, and reported that the average gain per cycle from GS across eight populations was 0.086 t ha -1 . Average grain yield of C 3 -derived hybrids was significantly higher than that of hybrids derived from C 0 . Hybrids derived from C 3 produced 7.3 % higher grain yield than those developed through conventional pedigree breeding. Semagn et al. (2015) reported that the average gain per cycle using MARS across 10 populations was 0.1837 t ha -1 under WW and 0.045 t ha -1 under DS conditions. Combined across DS environments, C 3derived hybrids produced 6.0, 8.3 and 37.8 % higher grain yields than hybrids derived from conventional pedigree breeding, parental lines and commercial checks, respectively. Across WW trials, the average grain yield of C 3 hybrids was significantly (P \\ 0.05) higher than those hybrids derived C 0 , the pedigree method and the commercial checks. In both studies, the authors used a composite bulk to represent lines extracted from each selection cycle instead of using individual lines. In this study, we report the testcross performance of hybrids developed from 47 to 74 individual C 1 S 2 lines instead of bulks derived from 10 MARS populations and evaluated under both managed drought-stress and optimum conditions. The objectives of the present study were: (1) to compare the overall gain in grain yield of all C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids with that of hybrids developed through conventional pedigree breeding method and (2) to compare yield stability of hybrids from a subset of selected populations developed through MARS and pedigree selection.Three cycles of MARS were completed on 10 tropical biparental populations. Detailed descriptions of the methodology and the results are given elsewhere (Beyene et al. 2015b) and briefly summarized here. Testcrosses were generated by crossing the F 2:3 families (C 0 ) from each population with a single-cross tester from a complementary heterotic group and evaluated under 2-3 managed drought stresses and 3-4 well-watered conditions in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Each C 0 population was genotyped with 190-225 SNPs and QTL analysis was performed for each population. Three selection cycles were conducted using a subset of 55-87 SNPs that were significantly associated with grain yield and anthesissilking interval. Selected C 0 families were first intermated to form Cycle 1 (C 1 ), followed by selfing of superior C 1 plants for two generations to form C 1 S 1 and C 1 S 2 . At each recurrent selection cycle, selected individuals were genotyped with the significantly associated markers to increase favorable allele frequency. In each population, the top eight families from C 0 were also advanced using a pedigree selection scheme. The various steps followed during MARS and pedigree phenotypic selection were illustrated by Beyene et al. (2015b).From each population, 47-74 C 1 S 2 lines developed through MARS, five S 5 lines developed via phenotypic pedigree selection, and the two founder parents (P1 and P2) were crossed to a single-cross tester (CML395/CML444) at the Maize Research Station of Kenya Agriculture and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), Kiboko, Kenya. This tester has proven to be useful in hybrid formation for subtropical and mid-altitude environments, and is also used as a parent in many commercial three-way-cross hybrids in SSA (Beyene et al. 2011(Beyene et al. , 2013)). Experimental lines were used as female parents, and the single-cross tester was used as the male parent. Seeds were harvested and bulked within each female row plot for use in the testcross evaluation. Testcrosses of each population, together with five commercial checks (CZH0616, H513, WH505, DK8053, and Pioneer 3253), were evaluated in 3-5 WW and 1-3 DS locations in Kenya in 2013 and 2014. An alpha-lattice design with two replications per location was utilized for the trials. The DS trials were conducted during the dry (rain-free) season by withdrawing irrigation starting 2 weeks before flowering through harvest, whereas the WW trials were conducted during the rainy season, with supplemental irrigation applied as needed. Entries were planted in two-row plots, 5 m long, with 0.75 m spacing between rows and 0.25 m between hills. Two seeds per hill were initially planted and then thinned to one plant per hill at 3 weeks after emergence to obtain a final plant population density of 53,333 plants per hectare. Fertilizers were applied at the rate of 60 kg N and 60 kg P 2 O 5 per ha as recommended for the area. Nitrogen was applied twice: at planting and 6 weeks after emergence. Fields were kept free of weeds by hand weeding.Data on grain yield (GY), plant height (PH) and anthesis date (AD) were collected. AD was recorded as the number of days from planting to when 50 % of the plants had shed pollen. PH was measured as the Euphytica distance from the base of the plant to the height of the first tassel branch. In DS trials, ears were harvested from each plot and all were shelled and weighed to determine the grain yield and percent grain moisture. In the WW experiments, ears harvested from each plot were weighed, sub-samples were shelled and grain moisture was determined on the sub-samples of grain. Grain yield was estimated assuming a shelling percentage of 80 % and adjusted to 125 g/kg moisture content.Analysis of variance for grain yield, anthesis date and plant height within and across DS and WW locations was performed using the PROC MIXED procedure of SAS (SAS Institute 2009) considering locations and incomplete blocks as random effects and entries as fixed effects. For each population, the analyses were performed on all entries and also on groups of entries corresponding to test-crosses involving: (i) C 1 S 2 lines; (ii) S 5 lines extracted through phenotypic pedigree selection; (iii) commercial checks; and (iv) founder parents used for making the original populations. Contrasts were made to compare the performance of all C 1 S 2 and the best 10 C 1 S 2 hybrids versus five hybrids from the conventional pedigree scheme, founder parents and five commercial check hybrids. Stability analysis was done using the linear-bilinear site regression models (SREG) (Crossa and Cornelius 1997).The combined analysis of variance across WW and DS environments showed highly significant differences among genotypes for grain yield, plant height and anthesis date. The interactions between genotypes and environments (GE) were also significant (data not shown). For most populations, the proportion of genotype to GE variance was higher for WW than DS, indicating that GE interaction was severe under drought stress than optimum-moisture conditions (Supplementary material S1). Genotypic variance for grain yield was 23-100 % larger under WW than under DS conditions. For anthesis date, variance of genotypes was 3-74 % larger under WW than under DS conditions for eight populations, but it was 39-82 % larger under DS than under WW conditions for two other populations (Supplementary material S1). Heritability estimates for grain yield were slightly higher under WW (0.3-0.8) than under DS (0-0.5) conditions. Heritability estimates for anthesis date and plant height were considerably higher under WW than under DS conditions (Table 1).Mean grain yields of all C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids across DS environments ranged from 2.14 to 3.01 t ha -1 (Table 1; Fig. 1), and the overall average was 2.61 t ha -1 . Mean grain yield of hybrids developed from all C 1 S 2 lines within each population was 1.7-10.8 % higher than that of hybrids derived from pedigree methods in five populations (1008, 1017, 1019, 1023 and 1028), and 3.4-12.4 % lower in the remaining five populations, but nearly all pairwise comparisons were not statistically significant (Supplementary material S2). However, each population was represented by 47-74 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids, which is considerably higher than hybrids derived from five S 5 lines using the pedigree method, five commercial checks and the founder parents. To make a reasonable comparison of the gains made through MARS, the best 10 C 1 S 2 derived hybrids were compared with hybrids derived using the pedigree scheme, commercial checks and founder parents. Across DS experiments, mean grain yields of the best 10 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids in all populations except population 1016 were significantly (P B 0.01) higher than mean grain yields of hybrids formed from pedigree-derived lines, commercial checks, and the founder parents (Fig. 1, Supplementary material S2). Excluding population 1016, the mean grain yield of the best 10 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids were 14.2-46.3 % (0.359-0.888 t ha -1 ), 10.3-55.1 % (0.310-1.247 t ha -1 ), and 4.0-53.0 % (0.098-1.152 t ha -1 ) higher than those of pedigree-derived hybrids, the commercial checks and the founder parents, respectively (Fig. 1, Supplementary material S2). In population 1016, the mean of the best 10 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids produced significantly (P B 0.05) higher grain yield (10.3 %) than the mean of the commercial checks. Combined across DS environments and all populations, the best 10 hybrids involving C 1 S 2derived lines produced 22.6 % (562 kg ha -1 ), 33.8 % (750 kg ha -1 ) and 27.8 % (916 kg ha -1 ) higher grain yield than hybrids formed from The numbers in parenthesis represent heritability estimates under DS conditions Euphytica pedigree-derived lines, commercial checks and founder parents, respectively (Supplementary material S2).Although grain yield was the primary target trait, anthesis date and plant height were also analyzed to determine if grain yield gain was related to a significant change in either trait. The best 10 hybrids involving C 1 S 2 -derived lines showed a difference of 0-1.5 days to flowering with those hybrids formed from pedigree-derived lines and up to 3.5 days difference compared with both the commercial checks and the founder parents (Fig. 2, Supplementary material S2). For PH, the mean of the best 10 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids from three populations (populations 1017, 1019, and 1023) was significantly taller than the mean of the five hybrids formed from lines derived using the pedigree method (Fig. 3, Supplementary material S2). Additionally, the mean plant heights of the best 10 hybrids involving C 1 S 2derived lines in nine of the ten populations were significantly higher than that of the commercial checks (Fig. 3).As shown in Table 1 and Fig. 1, mean grain yield of testcrosses evaluated in WW environments varied from 5.77 t ha -1 (population 1020) to 7.91 t ha -1 (population 1017), with an overall average of 6.60 t ha -1 . Mean grain yields of hybrids developed from all C 1 S 2 lines within each population showed a 0.4-2.8 % advantage over those hybrids involving pedigree-derived lines in six populations (1008, 1017, 1018, 1021, 1023 and 1028), but showed a 1.3-6.6 % reduction compared to those of the other four populations (Fig. 1, Supplementary material S2). All contrasts between the mean grain yield of the best 10 hybrids formed from C 1 S 2 -derived lines versus the mean grain yield of the five hybrids involving pedigree derived lines, the commercial checks and the founder parents were significant (P B 0.01) (Supplementary material S2). The best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines per population produced (a) 3.4-13.3 % higher grain yield than those developed using lines through the pedigree method, (b) 9.9-36.5 % higher grain yield than the commercial checks (except population 1019, which showed a 1.1 % reduction), and (c) 8.1-27.0 % higher grain yield than the founder parents. Taking into account the time invested in developing the lines and using the grain yield of the founder parents as a baseline, the top 10 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids on average produced 214.8 kg ha -1 year -1 under WW conditions, which is approximately double the 103.9 kg ha -1 year -1 grain yield observed for hybrids developed using the pedigree method. Mean flowering date of the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2derived lines was generally similar to those hybrids formed from pedigree-derived lines, the founder parents and the commercial checks, with a maximum difference of 1-3 days (Fig. 2, Supplementary material S2). Pairwise comparisons of mean plant height of the different groups were significant for most populations (Supplementary material S2). The best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines were 6-14.5 and 11-25.3 cm taller than the hybrids formed from pedigree derived lines and the commercial checks, respectively, in six populations (Fig. 3, Supplementary material S2). Compared with the commercial checks, the best 10 hybrids involving C 1 S 2 derived lines were 11.0-19.2 cm shorter in three populations (1019, 1020, and 1021).To compare grain yield stability of the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines with that of hybrids formed from pedigree derived lines, commercial checks and founders, we selected two populations (1016 and 1017) that were evaluated in three DS locations, and four populations (1015, 1021, 1023 and 1028) that were evaluated in five WW locations. Figure 4 summarizes biplots of the grain yield of the two populations evaluated under DS conditions. The first two axes from the GGE biplot for populations 1016 and 107 explained 87.6 and 80.1 %, respectively, of the genotypic main effect. The two-dimensional biplot showed that almost all of the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2derived lines had positive PC1 scores, suggesting they had above average performance. In population 1016, four hybrids derived from C 1 S 2 (entries 10, 34, 25,31 and 47) were high yielding and stable, with high PC1 scores and near-zero PC2 scores.The superior grain yield of most of the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines over the five hybrids involving pedigree-derived lines is depicted in Figs. 4  and 5. The majority of the top hybrids derived from C 1 S 2 were consistently located towards the upper right quadrant of the biplots, indicating that those entries had both a positive interaction with those environments and higher mean grain yield than entries located on the left-hand side of the biplots (opposite to the direction of the sites). The GGE biplot for populations 1015, 1021, 1023 and 1028 evaluated in five WW environments explained 53.5-73.8 % of the genotypic main effect (Fig. 5). The two-dimensional biplot showed that almost all of the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines had positive PC1 scores, suggesting above average performance, while most pedigree derived hybrids and the commercial checks had negative PC1 scores, indicating below average performance. Embu, Kakamega and Kaguru had longer vectors than the other locations, suggesting that they were the best locations for discriminating hybrids. In population 1023, most hybrids (entries 11, 42, 23, 6 Fig. 4 Biplot of the site regression model (SREG) for two biparental populations evaluated in three managed droughtstressed sites (Kiboko, Kiri and Mbee) in Kenya. Each population is represented by the best 10 hybrids derived from C 1 S 2 (black numbers) (other entries from the C 1 S 2 are represented by a black dot), commercial checks (abbreviated as Ck in green color), the 5 hybrids derived from the pedigree method (F6 in red) and founder parents P1 and P2 (light blue). (Color figure online) Euphytica and 57) had high and stable yields, as they have high positive PC1 scores and near zero PC2 scores. In some populations, the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines that had high grain yield under DS were also found to be among the best 10 under WW conditions (Table 2). For example, entries 27, 36 and 37 from population 1016 were among the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines in both DS and WW locations (Fig. 5; Table 2).Conventional pedigree breeding has been used successfully to develop improved maize germplasm with abiotic and biotic stress resilience. Since 2007, CIMMYT and partners have used conventional breeding methods to develop and release over 200 drought tolerant hybrids and open-pollinated maize varieties in SSA under the framework of the Drought Tolerant Maize for Africa project (DTMA 2015). However, developing improved varieties using conventional breeding methods takes long, since many economically important traits require simultaneous accumulation of favorable alleles from several genomic regions. The use of molecular markers within breeding pipelines is widely, and successfully, employed by large private sector companies (Johnson 2004;Eathington et al. 2007). Use of molecular markers for tropical maize improvement in the developing world is however, constrained by several bottlenecks (Xu et al. 2012;Mba et al. 2012).  To facilitate the development and use of improved tropical maize germplasm, CIMMYT in collaboration with public and private partners conducted the largest public MARS and GS projects as part of both the Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) and DTMA projects. Based on the genetic gain data collected by these projects across multiple populations, each represented by a composite bulk of lines, we recently demonstrated the superiority of MARS for increasing grain yield under DS and WW conditions across diverse tropical maize populations without significantly affecting plant height and maturity of most populations (Beyene et al. 2015a;Semagn et al. 2015). When genetic gains for individual populations were considered, results indicated that different populations showed deferent responses to MARS, with the majority of the populations producing higher grain yields than those developed using conventional breeding methods. A smaller number of populations showed either similar or no gain in grain yield under both WW and DS conditions as compared with those developed through pedigree selection. A possible factor contributing to the lack of gain in grain yield from those populations may be the representation of every population by a composite bulk prior to testcross formation, which was implemented primarily to minimize the number of entries to be evaluated.In the present study, hybrids developed by crossing 47-74 C 1 S 2 lines from each of the 10 MARS populations with a single cross tester were evaluated. Combined across all DS locations and populations, the best 10 C 1 S 2 -derived hybrids produced 562, 750 and 916 kg ha -1 higher grain yield than pedigree-derived hybrids, commercial checks and founder parents, respectively. In WW locations, the best 10 C 1 S 2derived hybrids produced 583, 1305 and 1557 kg ha -1 more grain yield than pedigree-derived hybrids, commercial checks and founder parents, respectively.As previously described by Beyene et al. (2015b) 3.5 years were required to develop S 5 lines through pedigree selection and 4 years to develop C 1 S 2 lines through MARS. Considering the number of years spent in developing the lines used in the study and taking the grain yield of the founder parents as the baseline data, the top 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines on average yielded 229 and 389.3 kg ha -1 year -1 in DS and WW conditions, respectively, which is higher than the yield of the hybrids formed from pedigreederived lines (27.2 kg ha -1 year -1 under DS and 103.9 kg ha -1 year -1 under WW). The overall gains from the best 10 hybrids of C 1 S 2 -derived lines in the present study were higher than previous results reported by Beyene et al. (2015b) using composite bulk sampling. Although composite bulking of C 1 S 2 lines prior to hybrid formation and their evaluation under multiple environments provided an overall idea of the genetic gain obtained through MARS over pedigree selection, results of the present study clearly  (2007), who compared MARS and conventional selection in 248 North American and European maize breeding populations, and reported higher performance and yield index gains for MARS that was more than doubled compared to phenotypic selection. They also found that the MARS-derived lines were higher performing compared to conventionally selected lines.A recent review of genetic gain studies from conventional pedigree selection conducted both in temperate and tropical maize germplasm reported highly variable results (Edmeades 2013). In SSA, preliminary estimates of yield gains from conventional selection revealed 39-80 kg ha -1 year -1 under optimal conditions, but only 18 kg ha -1 year -1 under drought stress (Edmeades 2013). A recent study using 67 hybrids developed at CIMMYT and released between 2000 and 2011 showed genetic gains of 32 and 109 kg ha -1 year -1 for grain yield under managed drought and wellwatered conditions, respectively (Masuka et al. 2015, submitted). Therefore, the overall average gain obtained under DS (229 kg ha -1 year -1 ) and WW (389.3 kg ha -1 year -1 ) in the current study was three to seven times higher than that reported from conventional phenotypic selection in SSA. Genetic gains obtained through pedigree breeding in the current study (27.2 and 103.9 kg ha -1 year -1 under DS and WW conditions, respectively) were similar to estimates reported in the literature in SSA (Edmeades 2013). Edmeades et al. (2004) reported that the phenotypic correlation between elite hybrid yields under stress versus under well-watered conditions declined as stress intensified, reaching 0.35 (r 2 = 0.12) when yield reductions reached 50 %. They suggested that stress adaptive mechanisms were not exposed until yields had been reduced by 30-50 % under stress. In the current study, the average grain yield were 6.60 t ha -1 under WW condition and 2.61 t ha -1 under DS condition, which represented a 61 % yield reduction, approaching the 70 % yield reduction typically targeted by CIMMYT in managed drought stress experiments in SSA (Ba ¨nziger et al. 2000). Accordingly, the best 10 C 1 C 2 lines identified in these studies from each population may have adaptive traits for drought tolerance, which could be utilized as sources of drought tolerance in maize breeding.Relative differences in genetic gains observed between MARS and pedigree selection were much higher under DS conditions than under WW conditions), suggesting that MARS could accelerate the pace of improvement, for complex traits such as drought tolerance. These results agree with previous reports (Eathington et al. 2007;Xu and Crouch 2008;Beyene et al. 2015b), indicating that MARS can be more efficient and effective than phenotypic selection, and could improve genetic gains for complex traits like drought tolerance in tropical maize breeding programs.Since drought incidence and severity vary considerably among years and within fields, it is important to develop hybrids that are able to withstand drought stress throughout the growing season, but also have no yield penalty under optimum conditions. Hybrids performing well under both DS and WW conditions were identified in this study (Table 2). For example, entries 14 and 25 in population 1008 and entries 27, 36, and 37 in population 1016 are among the top performing hybrids under both DS and WW conditions. Therefore, the parents of these hybrids need to be fixed through generation of inbreeding to develop hybrids that will perform better both under drought stress and well water conditions.","tokenCount":"4611"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"4de62c0cd3de3c6ae838ea7f53da96bd","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://repository.cimmyt.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/0dd566a0-bb30-4234-b1d3-f20c2ee43ca2/content","id":"892156763"},"keywords":["heat stress","heat stress tolerance","quantitative trait loci","quantitative trait nucleotides","single nucleotide polymorphism markers"],"sieverID":"0c146e40-1fd4-40d3-b315-4d262331c36e","pagecount":"12","content":"Increasing global temperature has adverse effects on crop health and productivity at both seedling and reproductivity stages. It is paramount to develop heat tolerant wheat cultivars able to sustain under high and fluctuating temperature conditions. An experiment was conducted to characterize 194 historical wheat cultivars of Pakistan under high temperature at seedling stage to identify loci associated with heat tolerance using genome-wide association studies (GWAS). A quantitative trait locus, TaHST1, on chr4A was also characterized to identify the haplotypes at this locus associated with heat tolerance in wheat from Pakistan. Initially, the diversity panel was planted under control conditions (25°C/20°C day and night temperature) in a glass house. At three leaf stage, plants were subjected to heat stress (HS) by increasing temperature (40°C/35°C day and night), while one treatment was kept at control condition. After 7 days of HS, data were collected for seedling morphology. Heat stress reduced these traits by 25% (root weight) to 40% (shoot weight), and shoot biomass was largely affected by heat stress. A GWAS model, fixed and random model circulating probability unification (FarmCPU), identified 43 quantitative trait nucleotides (QTNs) on all chromosomes, except chr7B, were associated under both HS and control conditions. Thirteen QTNs were identified in control, while 30 QTNs were identified in HS condition. In total, 24 haplotypes were identified at TaHST1 locus, and most of the heat tolerant genotypes were assigned to Hap-20 and Hap-21. Eleven QTNs were identified within 0.3-3.1 Mb proximity of heat shock protein (HSP). Conclusively, this study provided a detailed genetic framework of heat tolerance in wheat at the seedling stage and identify potential genetic regions associated with heat tolerance which can be used for marker assisted selection (MAS) in breeding for heat stress tolerance.Bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) is the most widely farmed cereal grain crop, accounting for one-fifth of the calories consumed worldwide (Shahinnia et al., 2016). It is primarily farmed as a food source for humanity, feeding over 35% of the world's population (Tahmasebi et al., 2013). According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), global wheat production is projected to exceed 761.7 million tonnes in 2020 (FAO, 2020). It is estimated that annual cereal production must increase by nearly 1 billion tonnes to feed the projected population of 9.1 billion by 2050.Wheat is widely grown in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world, which are subjected to a variety of biotic and abiotic stresses. High temperature is one of the abiotic stresses which drastically affects the production of wheat (Rahaie et al., 2013). Global climate models reported that the average ambient temperature is expected to rise by 6°C by the end of the twentyfirst century (De Costa, 2011). Many trials have revealed considerable yield losses in wheat due to HS, and it is anticipated that global wheat yields will drop by 4.1%-6.4% for every 1°C increase in global temperature (Liu et al., 2016). High temperature damages the wheat by effecting its physiological, biological and biochemical processes (Asseng et al., 2015). Heat stress affects the plant by damaging its photosynthetic machinery, compromised seed germination, reduce grain filling time duration, decrease in grain number, inactivation of Rubisco enzyme, slower the transportation of nutrients, premature leaf senescence, and reduce chlorophyll content which results in the reduction of yield (Hossain et al., 2013). Starch and protein content of grains are also affected by HS. Heat stress causes the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS), which leads to membrane instability, lipid peroxidation, protein oxidation, and nucleic acid damage (Mishra et al., 2011;Mittler et al., 2011).Several genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and quantitative trait loci (QTL) mapping concluded that heat stress tolerance (HST) in wheat is polygenic and is influenced by environmental factors (Guan et al., 2018;El Hassouni et al., 2019;Li et al., 2019). Several major and minor QTL were identified in these studies at vegetative and reproductive stages. For example, five QTL were identified on chr1B, chr1D, chr2B, chr6A and chr7A for HST in a recombinant inbred line (RIL) population (Ventnor × Karl 92) by using AFLP, SSR and EST markers (Talukder et al., 2014). In another study, several QTL were detected at chr1A, chr1B, chr2B, chr3B, chr5A and chr6D for HST in a RIL population (Halberd × Cutter) at grain filling stage using HSI as phenotypic data for QTL mapping (Mason et al., 2010). A GWAS study in US winter wheat identified four loci at chr3B, chr7D and chr2A for shoot length and several loci were detected at chr2B, chr2D, chr4A, chr4B and chr5B for chlorophyll content at seedling stage under heat stress (Maulana et al., 2018). Recently, Lu et al. (2022) evaluated 48 wheat genotypes and concluded that genotypes tolerant at seedling stage showed higher yield at reproductive stage after heat treatment, and seedling evaluation can be used for early selection of heat tolerant wheat genotypes.The genome size of hexaploid bread wheat is ~17Gb with 85% of repetitive sequence (IWGSC, 2018), frequent translocations, large deletions and inversions are found among wheat cultivars (Cheng et al., 2019;He et al., 2019). It is very challenging to isolate the genes responsible for HST in wheat by map-based cloning although heat tolerant mutants were identified 20 years ago (Mullarkey and Jones, 2000). TaHST1 is a QTL that is significantly associated with HST in both vegetative and reproductive stages of wheat (Zhai et al., 2021). It was mapped on the distal terminal of chr4A. According to reference genome sequence of Chinese spring (CS), this 0.949 Mb region has 19 high confidence genes (IWGSC, 2018). Five markers Xhau1-Xhau5 were used for the detection different haplotypes in this region in wheat cultivars (Zhai et al., 2021). Further investigation revealed that an unusual high number of deletion mutation in this region was observed, which was confirmed by using sequencing data from 10+ wheat genome project. 1  This study was designed to (i) characterize a diversity panel consisting of historical spring wheat cultivars against heat stress at seedling stage, (ii) identify quantitative trait nucleotides (QTNs) associated with heat tolerance at seedling stage in historical spring wheat cultivars of Pakistan, and (iii) characterize TaHST1 locus in diversity panel using gene-specific markers for its association with HST at seedling stage.The germplasm used in this study consists of a panel of 194 historical bread wheat cultivars of Pakistan released in the years between 1911 and 2019. Each cultivar with its release year and pedigree is given in Supplementary Table 1.Screening of seedlings against HS was performed at National Agriculture Research Centre, Islamabad, Pakistan. For this experiment, small transparent glasses (3 inch × 6 inch) filled with a mixture of peat moss and soil (80%:20%) were used. Six seeds of each cultivar were sown in a single glass. Three glasses of each cultivar in randomization were used for experimentation in each treatment, i.e., control and heat stress (HS). Before sowing, seeds were surface sterilized with 2% NaOCl. During the whole experiment, the plants were watered regularly to ensure that there will be no drought stress. At three leaves stage after germination, one panel was kept in control conditions with 25°C/20°C day/ night temperature, respectively. The 20 days old seedlings were subjected to HS by applying 40°C/35°C day and night time temperature, respectively. After 7 days of stress treatment, root length (RL), shoot length (SL), root weight (RW), and shoot weight (SW) was measured. A total of six measurements were taken from each line and then average data was used for further statistical analysis. Biomass of both control and stressed plants was taken by electrical weighing balance.Heat susceptible index of all traits in optimal and stress condition was calculated by formula proposed by Fisher and Maurer (1978):where YD is the mean of genotypes in heat stress condition, YP is the mean of genotypes in optimal conditions, D = 1 − [mean of genotypes in stress condition/mean of genotypes in control condition].DNA from each cultivar was extracted following standard protocol (Dreisigacker et al., 2013). Wheat cultivars were genotyped using 50 K SNP array, which generated 66,876 SNPs. After filtering with minor allele frequency of >5% and missing data of <10%, a total of 52,610 SNPs were retained and used for the GWAS analysis.The details of primers used in the reaction are described in Supplementary Table 2. The PCR reaction mix (10 μl) consisted of 3 μl PCR H 2 O, 5 μl master mix (2× Taq PCR mix), forward and reverse primers 0.5 μl each and 1 μl of DNA. The PCR was carried out at following conditions: initial denaturation at 95°C for 5 min (1 cycle), 94°C for 1 min, annealing at 65°C, 56°C, 58°C, 65°C, and 60°C, respectively, for 1 min, extension at 72°C for 1 min (35 cycles). The PCR products were checked in 2% agarose gel.Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) among all traits was used to examine the correlation between different traits in control and HS conditions. This statistical analysis was performed by using R statistical software. Genotypic data from the 50 K SNP array was subjected to quality control for further use. Initially, all the SNPs with missing data >10% and minor allele frequency (MAF) <5% were excluded. The remaining SNPs were used for GWAS.Principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to get information about principal structure and first five PC scores were taken as a Q matrix. Kinship matrix (k) was calculated by TASSEL v5.1. FarmCPU model was used to identify the quantitative trait nucleotides (QTNs). The GWAS was carried out using R-Package of Rmvp v3.1. Linkage disequilibrium (LD) was determined between SNPs identified as QTNs. To check the linkage disequilibrium within and across three genomes of bread wheat (A, B and D), squared allele frequency correlation (r 2 ) values were used between marker pairs. Markers containing (r 2 ) value 1 on the same chromosome were removed.In both temperature treatments (control and HS), significant variations in seedling phenotypes were observed in the diversity panel. The descriptive statistics and frequency distribution plots under control and HS conditions are given in Table 1; Figure 1, respectively. Mean RL at control condition was 13.74 cm with a range from 9.3 cm (Raj) to 22.3 cm (C-250), while under HS, the mean RL was 14.14 cm with a range from 7 cm (AZRC) to 21.5 cm (Lasani-08). In control condition, the mean RW was 0.125 g with a range from 0.03 (Raj) g to 0.5 g (Sutluj-86), while in HS condition the mean RW was 0.12 g with a range from 0.01 (AZRC) to 0.45 g (Takbeer). Mean SL was 40.75 cm with a range of 26 cm (Dilkash) to 59 cm (Faisalabad-83) compared with HS condition where mean SL was 37 cm with a range from 24 cm (Nishan-21) to 49 cm (NIA-Sunder). Similarly, mean SW at control condition was 1.5 g with a range from 0.5 g (Pakhtunkhawa-15) to 3 g (Rashkoh-05) and in HS condition mean SW was 0.7 g with a range of 0.3 g  Frequency distribution of traits at optimal and heat stress condition. (A,B) shows root length at optimal and HS conditions, while (C,D) shows root weight, (E,F) shoot length, and (G,H) shows shoot weight at optimal and heat stress conditions, respectively.(Subhani) to 1.4 g (Takbeer). In HS, SL was reduced by 15%-20%, and SW was reduced by 40%-45%. RL and RW were only reduced by 10%-15% each. Fold variation was observed in HS treatment. Mean fold variation for RL was 1.02-fold ranging from 0 to 2-fold.In RW, there was 3-fold variation ranging from 1 to 5.4-fold.Similarly, mean fold variation for SL in HS was 0.42-fold ranging from 0.006 to 1.0-fold.Pearson coefficient of correlation between all traits under control and HS conditions are shown in Figure 2. Positive correlation was observed between RL and RW under control (r = 0.39) and HS (r = 0.61) conditions. Correlation between RW and SW was (r = 0.32) and (r = 0.5) under control and HS, respectively. While RW and SL had (r = 0.2) and (r = 0.19) in control and HS, respectively. SL and SW also showed significantly positive correlation of in control (r = 0.62) and HS (r = 0.42).Mean values of all traits were used to calculate heat susceptible index (HSI). Almost 7.7% genotypes showed HSI < 0.5 for SW and 23% genotypes showed HSI < 0.5 for SL. Phenotypic data of all 194 wheat cultivars used in this study under control and heat stress conditions is given in Supplementary Table 4.In total 66,836 SNP markers were genotyped with 50 K SNP array. After quality control, 38 markers were removed having missing data and 14,188 markers were removed with MAF <0.05. Subsequently, 52,610 SNPs were used for GWAS. The SNPs were distributed on all chromosomes with maximum number of SNPs on chr2B (n = 3,510) and least number of SNPs on chr4D (n = 1,210). Highest number of SNPs were distributed on B-genome (20,636) followed by (18,564) on A-genome and (13,408) on D-genome. Genotypic data as HapMap file for all wheat cultivars used in this study is given in Supplementary Table 3.FarmCPU model has the high statistical power to control the false positive therefore we used this model in our study to report QTNs associated with phenotypes. Manhattan plots of all traits under study are presented in Figures 3, 4. SNP markers which were significantly associated with the traits in control and HS conditions are given in Table 2. In total 43 QTNs were identified that were associated with all four traits in control (n = 13) and HS conditions (n = 30). For RL in control condition, two QTNs were identified on chr3A at 721.3 Mb and chr5B at 559.4 Mb (Figure 3A; Table 2). Three QTNs were identified on chr2A, chr3D and chr6D for RL in HS condition (Figure 3B; Table 3).For RW in control conditions, no significant QTN was identified. In HS conditions, three QTNs were identified for RW on chr3B (720.85 Mb), chr6A and chr6B (Figure 3D; Table 2). In control condition, four QTNs were identified for SL on chr3B, chr6A, chr6B and chr7D. All these QTNs were mapped at 594.59 Mb,615.41 Mb,711.28 Mb and 443.42 Mb, respectively and each QTN was represented by one SNP (Figure 4A; Table 2). Fourteen QTNs were identified for SL in HS condition (Figure 4B; Table 2). For SW in control condition, 7 QTNs were identified at chr1A, chr1D, chr4B, chr5B and chr5D (Figure 4C; Table 2). In HS condition, 10 QTNs were identified for SW (Figure 4D; Table 2).Based on SNP effect, favorable and unfavorable alleles were identified, and their frequencies were determined. For RL under control conditions, 43 (38%) cultivars did not have any of the favorable allele, while five cultivars had maximum number of two favorable alleles. Similarly, four cultivars (3.6%) did not have unfavorable allele while 59 cultivars (53.1%) had maximum number of three unfavorable alleles. For RW under control condition, 81 (71%) cultivars had no favorable allele, while 30 (26%) cultivars had one favorable allele. Similarly in heat stress condition, only one cultivar had no unfavorable allele, while maximum number of 69 (61%) cultivars had three unfavorable alleles. For SL in control condition, 60 (53%) cultivars had no favorable allele while six cultivars had more than three favorable alleles. Similarly, in HS two cultivars had one unfavorable allele and maximum number of 17 cultivars had 14 unfavorable alleles. For SW in control, 40 (35%) had no favorable allele, while 5 (4%) cultivars had maximum seven favorable alleles. Similarly, in HS condition, 20 (17%) cultivars had no unfavorable allele while maximum number of 92 (81%) cultivars had one unfavorable allele. The coefficient of determination (R 2 ) indicated that effect of favorable alleles ranged from R 2 = 0.94 (RL) to R 2 = 0.76 (SW; Figures 5A-D), while effect of unfavorable alleles ranged from R 2 = 0.96 (RL) to R 2 = 0.76 (SW; Figures 6A-D).In wheat, the position of all heat shock proteins (HSPs) were identified according to Kumar et al. (2020). In total, 11 QTNs were identified in proximity of HSPs (Table 3). The closet QTN was for RL (AX-179558694) on chr3D which was Pearson's correlation coefficients describing association of various traits in wheat under control and HS conditions.  A locus on terminal end of chr4A consisting of 0.949 Mbp plays an important role in heat stress tolerance in wheat and likely to have a heat stress tolerance gene (Zhai et al., 2021). This region contains 19 high confidence genes and was characterized by using  \"−\" and \"+\" sign in distance from HSP indicates presence of SNP in upstream and downstream, respectively.Scatter plots showing the effect of favorable alleles in (A) root length, (B) root weight, (C) shoot length and (D) shoot weight in HS.five gene-specific DNA markers (Zhai et al., 2021). Among them, Xhau-1, -2, -3, and 5 were dominant markers, while Xhau-4 was either co-dominant or dominant depending on the lines analyzed. In total, 24 haplotypes in historical bread wheat cultivars of Pakistan were identified based on the allelic variation of five markers (Table 4). Haplotype 1 has highest frequency of 19.4% with 3 deleted sites followed by Hap2 (13.1%) with 5 deleted sites and Hap17 (11.4%) with 2 deleted sites. Twenty-three (13%) cultivars showed complete deletion of region as no amplification was observed with any marker, whereas 17 cultivars (9.7%) were amplified with all markers used in the study.The basal expression of these genes in different lines was observed using RNAseq data of 24 cultivars present in the diversity panel (unpublished data). Five genes were differentially expressed in roots, while only one gene (TraesCS4A02G499500) was differentially expressed in leaves (Figure 7). This gene is a cellular component of plant and resides in thylakoid membrane of chloroplast. At molecular level, this gene is involved in copper ion binding and electron transfer activity. Higher expression of the gene was observed in Punjab-96, Pothowar-7, Parwaz-94, Pari, Inquilab-91, Dharabi-2011 and chakwal-50. Frontiers in Plant Science 09 frontiersin.orgIn present study, a diversity panel consisting of 194 historical wheat cultivars was evaluated for heat stress tolerance and identification of loci associated with RL, RW, SL, and SW under HS tolerance. The panel used in this study for association mapping showed great variations in RL, RW, SL, and SW at control and HS conditions.Significant variations in all traits were observed in both control and HS conditions. The cultivars having HSI higher than 0.5 were regarded as sensitive to HS, while those having lower HSI values were heat tolerant (Fisher and Maurer, 1978). More than 75% cultivars showed 0-1 HSI values, and modern cultivars like Markaz-19 and MA-21 were highly sensitive to HS. Sutluj-86, Bahawalpur-97 and Pirsabak-15 showed very low HSI values. Genotypes with minimum HSI values for SL were Bahawalpur-97, Pirsabak-15 and Sutluj-86. For SW minimum HSI values were shown by  Based on these results, these three cultivars were considered as heat tolerant as compared to other genotypes.The analysis indicated that all the traits are highly co-related with each other. No significant correlation was found previously between these traits (Ram Poudel et al., 2021). Under HS, RL and RW were significantly correlated to SL and SW. The higher positive correlation indicated that HS effect on the below-ground parts can be selected based on the above-ground shoot traits.To the best of our knowledge, very few GWAS have been conducted for HST at seedling stage in wheat. Maulana et al. (2018) evaluated US winter wheat cultivars and assessed HS on traits like leaf chlorophyll content, SL, number of leaves per seedling and seedling recovery. However, many gene mapping studies were conducted for heat stress tolerance at flowering and reproductive stages (Vijayalakshmi et al., 2010;Talukder et al., 2014). In control condition, the QTNs associated with RL on chr3A and chr5B were not found in stress condition. At seedling stage, very little is known for MTAs associated with roots under heat stress in wheat. In HS, two QTNs were identified on chr2D for SL and SW at 29 Mb which are located in close proximity of 4 QTL identified by Sangwan et al. ( 2019) on chr2D at 27.9 cM for days to heading, days to maturity and photosynthetic rate.In our findings, common QTNs associated with SL were found in both control and heat stress conditions. The presence of QTNs on chr6A, chr6B and chr7D for SL in control and HS conditions indicated that these QTL are strictly related to SL and have no effect of HS. Contrary to Maulana et al. (2018), no QTN on chr3B and chr7B for SL in control and HS conditions.Under control, QTN associated with SL were positioned on chr1A, chr1D, chr4B, chr5B and chr5D. These QTNs were not found under HS conditions. No QTN was identified on chr3B for SW in HS. In a previous study, a QTL on chr3B chromosome was found responsible for increase shoot biomass in heat stress condition not found in this study (Thomelin et al., 2021).     Expression of 19 genes in roots and leaves of a subset of 28 wheat cultivars used in this study.TaHST1 locus plays a significant role in heat stress tolerance at both seedling and reproductive stage. Twenty-four haplotypes were detected using a set of five primers to detect TaHST1 locus Among the most frequent haplotypes, hap-20 had the highest SW values followed by hap-21. The results indicated that the presence of TaHST1 has significant effects on wheat in heat stress condition, rather than optimal conditions. The genes that are present in this region has higher expression in roots, and only one gene involved Frontiers in Plant Science 11 frontiersin.org in copper ion binding and electron transfer activity was highly expressed in leaves. It is likely that this gene is an important component of this locus and is associated with SL in HS conditions.In a nutshell, some of the QTNs that are related to heat stress tolerance found in this research were already identified by other studies, although the stages of development were different in the previous and current study. Many new QTNs were also identified that are significantly related to HST. Wheat cultivars having favorable haplotypes of TaHST1 locus could be promising candidates for breeding for heat stress adaptability. To the best of our knowledge, this is first GWAS on historical wheat cultivars of Pakistan at seedling stage. The significant SNP markers and cultivars identified in this study will be used for marker assisted selection (MAS) for heat tolerant to facilitate the trait selection during breeding.","tokenCount":"3719"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"aca78281dc7f46f9b21ae64b5961f7ae","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/ea720473-10e6-433d-9f9d-31654fd76848/retrieve","id":"-618966504"},"keywords":["Dairy production systems","management practices","feed resources availability"],"sieverID":"9ef3fc98-1921-47a4-ab87-114286d3facd","pagecount":"103","content":"This is to certify that the thesis entitled \"Assessment of the current status of dairy cattle production and management practices in Dugda district of East Shoa Zone of Oromia, Ethiopia.\" submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master's with specialization in Animal production, the Graduate Program of the Department/School of Range and Animal Sciences, and has been carried out by Fikremariam Negasa Id. No ARSC 017/06, under my/our supervision. Therefore I/we recommend that the student has fulfilled the requirements and hence hereby can submit the thesis to the department. _______________________. _____________________. _________________. Name of major advisor Signature Date iii APPROVAL SHEET-II SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES HAWASSA UNIVERSITY We, the undersigned, members of the Board of Examiners of the final open defense by have read and evaluated his/her thesis entitled \"Assessment of the current status of dairy cattle production and management practices in Dugda district of East Shoa Zone of Oromia,Ethiopia\", and examined the candidate. This is, therefore, to certify that the thesis has been accepted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degreeTable 1 Average age and family size based on sex and work condition in production system . Table 2 Educational background of household heads (%) across dairy production system ...... Table 3 Religions of household headed in the dairy production system ................................... Table 4 Average livestock holding per household across the dairy production systems ........... Table 5 Purpose of cattle keeping (%) by farmers in the three production systems .................. Table 6 Proportion of labour division (%) among production systems in Dugda woreda ......... The research was conducted to assess the current status of dairy cattle production and management practices in Dugda district of East Shoa Zone of Oromia, Ethiopia. Eight sample Kebeles were purposively selected based on the potentiality of milk production and stratified as urban, peri urban and rural dairy production systems. Semi-structured questionnaire, secondary data sources and personal observation were employed to generate data. A total of 144 farmers which included 36 from urban, 54 from peri urban and 54 dairy producers from rural dairy production systems were randomly selected for the study. In urban dairy production system daily milk yield for cross breed cow (10.11±0.96 lit) was higher (P<0.05) than peri urban and rural dairy production systems. Mean lactation length was lower (P<0.05) in urban for local breeds as compared to peri urban and rural production systems. Lactation length for crossbreed dairy cow was higher (P<0.05) in urban than rural and peri-urban production system. Mean ages at first calving in peri-urban for both local (39± 0.47months) and cross breeds (27.84±0.46 months) were shorter (P<0.05) as compared to peri urban and rural dairy production systems. The calving interval for crossbreed dairy cow was longer (P<0.05) in the rural (19 months) than that of urban (16.96 months) and peri urban (17.40 months) production systems. About 94.4% of the households in urban dairy production system practiced teat wash before and after milking. About 97. 2%, 57.4%, and 20.4% of the urban, peri-urban and rural households clean their milking utensils before and after milking, respectively. In the urban system, the major dairy product produced were butter (for 25% of the households), fermented whole milk (30.6%) and cottage cheese (19.5%).Butter was the primary product in peri-urban (88.9%) and rural (92.6%) production system. Dairy producers prioritized the major constraints of dairy farming in the following order: feed shortage, diseases problems, high price of feeds, problems related to market availability, breed related problem, capital shortage and high price of medicaments. The most important sources of animal feeds were crop residues followed by natural pasture. Annual feed balance estimation revealed that the total estimated available feed supply in urban dairy, peri-urban rural systems met 57.34%, 84.34% and 90.46% of the maintenance DM requirement of livestock, respectively. Milk handling practices are also sub-optimal under semi-urban and rural production system. Therefore, improving the nutritive value of crop residues and enhancing fodder conservation and utilization is critical to dairy production. Training needs to be provided with regard to milk and milk products handling. Improvement in marketing of milk and milk products should get due attention so that farmers optimize the opportunity from the sector.Agriculture is the backbone of Ethiopian economy, shares the largest portion of national gross domestic product. According to World Bank (2014) agricultural sector is the leading sector in Ethiopian economy by contributing 42.3% for total national gross domestic product (GDP). Out of the total agricultural GDP, livestock sectors contributes about 40% to agricultural gross domestic product and solely the livestock subsector contributes about 26.4% to the national Gross Domestic Product (ILRI, 2016). According to LOL (2010) livestock also performs multiple functions in the Ethiopian household economy by providing food, input for crop production and soil fertility management, cash income as well as in promoting savings, fuel, social functions, and employments. With these multiple functions, livestock can serve as a vehicle for improving food security and better livelihood of the rural population.In terms of the number, Ethiopia owns the largest livestock population in Africa, comprising about 55.03 million heads of cattle of which 98.71 percent cattle in the country are local breeds (CSA, 2014). Out of this total cattle population, the female cattle constitute about 55.38 percent and the remaining 44.62 percent are male cattle (CSA, 2014).Inspite of the huge numbers of livestock resource and great potential for increased livestock production, the benefits obtained from the sector does not match with the high livestock population due to a number of dynamic economic, technical, policy and institutional challenges. Livestock producers encounter various livestock management problems, prevalence of major diseases, poor feeding, highly based on indigenous breed and high stocking rate on grazing lands. Thus, the contribution of this sector in the agricultural economy of the country remains lower. Among livestock production, dairy sector is a major contributor to economic development, especially among the developing countries. As an engine of growth, it provides increased income, employment food and foreign exchange earnings as well as better development, the share of animal products in total food budget increases faster than that of cereals. The development of the dairy sector in Ethiopia can contribute significantly to poverty alleviation and nutrition in the country. Furthermore, as it is produced daily and is an important cash source for smallholder farmers, dairying offers a pathway out of poverty to a large number of smallholder households keeping dairy cattle which is also a means of diversifying livelihood strategies. Dairy production is therefore, a critical issue in Ethiopian household economy and its products are important source of food and income. However, dairying has not been fully exploited and promoted in the country (Sintayehu et al., 2008) as compared with other neighbour countries like Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Despite its potential for dairy development, productivity of indigenous livestock genetic resources in general is low, and the direct contribution it makes to the national economy is limited. According to CSA (2014) national average milk production per cow was estimated at only 1.37 litres/day, and the per capita milk consumption was only about 19.2kg/year (MOA, 2012), which is much lower than African and world per capita averages of 27 kg/year and 100 kg/year, respectively (FAO, 2009). Also milk production, milk collection, processing and marketing in the country is not well developed. Zewdie (2010) reported that annual milk production per cow in Ethiopia is generally low due to low efficiency of reproductive and productive performance of dairy cows. Another major problem to such low milk production is shortage of livestock feed both in quantity and quality, especially during the dry season. In general, the development potential of livestock production is negatively influenced by the chronic shortage of fodder in most of the livestock producing areas. Many years ago, a lot of efforts have been made towards dairy development to improve t milk production through providing extension service by government and non-governmental institutions. However, the result obtained from such efforts is not satisfactory to all smallholder dairy farmers in the country as well as in the study area.Recently, NGOs (LIVES) promoted dairy development through capacity building to increase milk production and to improve incomes of crop livestock mixed farmers in the study area. Therefore, Dugda woreda is one of the livestock and irrigation value chain for Ethiopian smallholder (LIVES) project interventions which was chosen due to its potential for dairy production (DWOL, 2010). However, the potential of dairy cattle, productive and reproductive performance of dairy cattle, marketing systems, milk handling method were not yet studied and the information of dairy activities were not documented. Therefore, it is very important to explore the current situation of dairy production and marketing systems; and to assess the present dairy management practices in the district. Hence this study was initiated to assess dairy potentials, dairy cattle performance, identify constraints related to dairy activities with the general objective of assessing dairy production, management practices and marketing system in the area.To characterize dairy cattle production and marketing system in the district.To assess feed resources availability in the study area To identify the main constraints of dairy production systemsThere are different criteria for the classification of dairy production systems in Ethiopia. Based on location or scale of market orientation and production intensity as criteria, three major dairy production systems are reported in Ethiopia (Dereje et al., 2005;Sintayehu et al., 2008). These are traditional smallholders, peri-urban and urban dairy production systems.Urban dairy farming is a system involves highly specialized, state or businessmen owned farms as well as smallholder urban dairy keeping households which are mainly concentrated in major cities of the country. For a decade a number of smallholder and commercial dairy farms are emerging mainly in the urban and peri-urban areas of the capital and most regional towns and districts and have no access to grazing land (Nigussie,2005;Yitay et al.' 2007). Smallholder rural dairy farms are also increasing in number in areas where there is market access.Per urban production system is developed around the cities where agricultural land is shrinking due to the expansion of urbanization. In this system crossbred animals are kept in small to medium-sized farms. Urban and peri-urban production systems include commercial to smallholder dairy farms. Such farms are reported to be found in and around major cities including Addis Ababa and other regional towns. The main source of feed is both own farm produced and purchased hay and the primary objective is to get additional cash income from milk sale (Yitay, 2008).The rural dairy production system is part of the subsistence farming system which is the predominant production system that includes pastoralists, agro-pastoralists, and crop-livestock producers. Largely, the system is based on low producing indigenous breeds of zebu cattle. The livestock are kept under traditional management conditions and generally obtain most of their feed from native vegetation, aftermath grazing and crop residues (Tsehay, 2002).Pastoralist is the major system of milk production in lowlands. However, because of the low rainfall, shortage of feed and water availability, milk production is low and highly influenced by season (Tsehay, 2002). The system is not market oriented and most of the milk produced in it is retained for home consumption (Ahmed et al., 2003) or household processing. Processing is usually done using traditional technology in to products such as butter, ghee, ayib and sour milk. Milk and milk products are usually marketed through the informal market after the households satisfy their needs (Tsehay, 2002).Agro-pastoralists are part of the pastoral society who promotes opportunistic crop farming to improve food security. Traditionally its one way of maintaining ownership rights over the use of land. It enables the production of crops to be used by both humans and livestock (Beruk and Tafesse, 2001).Cultivation is wider practices in pastoral area depending on rainfall.According to the crop and livestock production integrated farming systems can be categorized as crop-livestock and livestock-crop systems. In the crop-livestock system, cropping is primary and the more important farming activity, while livestock is secondary. In the livestock/crop system, the livestock is the primary activity and cropping takes secondary position in terms of farming importance (Janke, 1982).The crop-livestock production system is available in most of the Central Rift of Ethiopia.Dairy cow is the main source of milk production in Ethiopia and dairy production depends mainly on indigenous livestock genetic resources; more specifically on cattle, goats, camels and sheep. Cattle contributed 81.2% of the total national annual milk output, followed by 7.9% of goats, 6.3% of camels and 4.6% of sheep (CSA 2009). Even though Ethiopia has potential for dairy development, productivity is low due to highly dependence on indigenous livestock genetic resources which account more than 98 % total cattle in the country and the direct contribution it makes to the national economy is limited (CSA,2014). Accordingly, the current average lactation period per cow at country level is estimated to be about six months, and average milk yield per cow per day is about 1.37 litres.The majority of dairy households in Ethiopia directly consume most of their animals' milk production. An increase in household income through the adoption of improved dairy technology has been found to lead to improving the household's nutrient intake which contributes to better health and nutrition (CSA, 2010). However, level of milk consumption was influenced by households' income, amount of milk production, religious and price of milk. Kassahun and Fikadu(2009) indicated that the consumption level of milk was significantly correlated with household income, consumer unit (family size) education level of the food budget manager, ownership of dairy cattle, monthly expenditure on dairy products, average daily milk production per household and price of milk products. Kassahun et al. (2014) reported that the higher proportion of Orthodox Christianity (87.5 and 91.2%) household in East Shoa Zone (Ada'a and Lume) districts respectively, may not have impact on the adoption of dairy technologies however; it has impact on the utilization of milk and milk products especially during the fasting periods. The amount of milk consumption also varies according to the location as well as production systems. The recent finding by Azage et al. (2013) in the rural highland dairy production system of Fogera woreda indicated that about 20.6% of daily milk produced was consumed by the households, while 65.5% is processed into milk products and used for home consumption and sale. Bilatu et al. (2013) reported that about 94% of the milk produced in East Shoa Zone (Ada'a and Lume districts) was sold while only 6% was retained for home consumption. Kassahun (2008) also indicated that the highest amount of milk was allocated for the sale in the same study area. Similarly, the studies conducted at Mekele area of Northern region by Nigussie (2006) revealed that 79% of the milk produced by urban dairy farmers was allocated for marketing.Usually cows do not produce their first calve at earlier stage of their age. Recent research finding by Tadelle and Nibret (2014) in North Gondar of Amhara regional state had shown that the average age at fist calving for indigenous dairy cows ranged from 39.8 to 45.4 months. Mureda and Mekuraiw (2007); Ibrahim et al. (2011) and Lemma and Kebede (2011) had reported age at first calving of 36.2, 34.7, and 33.2 months, for crossbred cows , respectively , in different areas of Ethiopia. But slightly different from the means (32.4, 39.2 and 40.6 months) were also reported by Tadesse et al. (2010) and Moges (2012). Kefelegn et al. (2014) reported that age at first calving for indigenous, crossbred and higher grade (exotic) cows in Adama district was 51. 8,31.8 and 33.8 months ,respectively. Figure in Ada'a and Lume districts demonstrated that the age at first calving of indigenous ,crossbred and exotic breed dairy cows were 49. 1,33.7,35.6 months and 51.0,39.5 and 38.0 months, respectively. These variations of age at first calving might be due to variation in location, breed and level of management.Calving interval is a function of calving-to-conception interval or days open, which is considered to be the most important component determining the length of calving interval, and gestation length, which is more or less constant. Calving interval varies slightly due to breed, calf sex, calf size, dam age, year, and month of calving. Longer calving interval reduce number of lactation initiated in total life and the total number of heifers in the herd which consequently reduce the chance of replacement with better animals. Kefelegn et al. (2014) reported mean calving interval of about 18. 7, 20.4 and 20.7months for indigenous breed cattle in the three districts of East Shoa zone Adama, Lume and Ada'a, respectively. By the same authors, calving interval of crossbred cattle was estimated to be 15. 6, 17.4 and 15.8 months in the same area, respectively. Zewudie (2010) also estimated that mean calving interval of crossbred in Highland system is about 15.7 months, whereas calving interval for indigenous breed in Central Rift Valley production systems is estimated to about 22 months. Report by Kedija (2007) from Mieso district of Oromia regional state shown that a minimum and maximum calving interval for local breed cows were 11 and 24 months, respectively. Over all calving interval estimated at 16 months. Abebe et al. (2014)  The estimated average daily milk yield for Zebu X Holstein-Friesian crossbred dairy cows in Jimma town of Oromia region was reported with the valued of 8.52 litres (Belay et al., 2012). Yitaye (2008)   (10.70,11.11 and 11.88L) at different location of East Shoa Zone (Adama,Lume and Ada'a),respectively. However, in central rift valley around Ziway, Zewdie (2010) estimated the lowest overall average daily milk yield who valued as 7.6 L With regard to daily milk yield obtained from local breed cows, the average milk yield varied between 2 to 3 litres in the three districts of East Shoa Zone (Kefelegn et al., 2014). Also Zewudie (2010) reported about 1.5 litres of overall milk yield in East shoa Zone. Similarly, in the other areas of the country, a mean daily milk yield of 2.2 L/day (Jiregna et al., 2013) in Western part of Oromia ;1.8 L/day (Abebe et al., 2014) in southern part of Ethiopia; Lemma et al. (2005)   (CSA, 2014). For both breed type; the difference might be associated with feed shortage due to extended period of drought during the study seasons. Moreover, indigenous breeds of cattle are low yielders under poor management conditions (Million and Tadelle, 2003).The estimated average lactation length for Zebu X Holstein-Friesian crossbred dairy cows in Jimma Town of Oromia region was reported with the valued 9.13manths (Belay et al., 2012). Yitaye (2008) also reported 11.2 months for Borana crossbred cows in urban and peri-urban areas of North Western Highlands. Mulugeta and Belayneh (2013) reported the higher values of lactation length for crossbreds in North Shoa (11.1 ± 4.8 months).On the other hand, the estimated lactation length for local Arsi zebu cows was 8.3months (Lemma et al., 2005).Also (Adugna and Aster, 2007)   (Kedija, 2007).The lowest value of lactation length reported by national livestock survey (2014) was 6 months average. Number of service per conception depends largely on the breeding system used. It is higher under uncontrolled natural breeding than hand-mating and artificial insemination (Moges, 2012). The overall Least Squares Means for NSPC in North, Gondar Zone was 1.8 (Belay et al., 2012) and the overall least squares means for NSPC in the indigenous dairy cow is 2.0.. Additionally, 2.33 1.98 and 2.25 number of service per conception for cross breed and 1.56, 1.45 and 1.57 for local cows were reported by Kefelegn (2014) in Adama, Lume and Ada'a, respectively.Smallholder milk producers use different traditional storage and processing facilities. Plant materials are used for seasoning and fumigation of milk containers to increase the shelf life of highly perishable dairy products such as milk, butter milk, cottage type cheese and butter.Among which butter is the most shelf stable product (Alganesh and Fekadu, 2012) direct means of milk contamination, unclean hands and milking equipment is the main factor affect milk product. Milking system among the traditional smallholder farmers' production systems in the country was entirely hand milking. Washing of udder before milking was mainly practiced by farmers of peri-urban (Fikrineh et al., 2012) Hygienic milk production is important and should take into account the sanitation of the barn, personnel involved in milking and the utensils used to collect and store milk. Cleaning of the teats before milking contributes to hygienic milk production. However, it is not common practice to sanitize teats before milking in the rural dairy production systems, and the number of farmers sanitizing teats is few in urban dairy production system with the assumption that teats are cleaned when the calf suckles before milking (Azage.T.et al, 2013).Similar finding was also reported by Kedija(2007) from Mieso district of Oromia region which expressed washing of teats is not practiced, and the producers believe that during calf suckling for milk let-down, the teat get washed by the saliva of calf and therefore it is not as such important to wash the teat before milking (Kedija,2007). In East Showa zone of Oromia region majority of the women (85.5%) follows limited sanitary procedure before and after milking, only few women (14.5%) wash the udder of the cow before milking (Lemma, et al., 2005).Livestock feed resources in Ethiopia are mainly natural grazing lands and browses, crop residues, pasture, forage crop and agro-industrial by products. Using of improved forages and agro-industrial by products is minimal and most of agro-industrial by-products are concentrated in urban and peri-urban areas (Alemayehu, 2005).According to Million et al. (2014) , the major feed resources for dairy cattle in urban dairy production systems of Ada'a Liban districts were involved agro-industrial by products, commercial concentrates and purchased crop residues. Adebabay (2009), Million et al. (2014) and Sintayehu et al.(2008) shown that the existence of different types and different feeds sources which includes crop residues, natural grazing ,commercial feeds and non conventional feed( local brewery) were common feed resources based on availability and production systems.Many researchers estimated the average dry matter production in different areas of the country based of feed availability. Bogale et al. (2008) in Bale highland and Dawit et al. (2013) in East Shoa Zone of Adami Tullu Jiddo Kombolcha Woreda and Zewdie (2010) in central rift valley of Ethiopia estimated the average of dry matter production. Based on Karl (1982) recommendation DM requirement, Zewdie (2010) estimated that crop residues contributed about 86.38% of total feed DM production in Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia, respectively. Also Bogale (2008) and Dawit et al. (2013) reported that 7.6 and (9.69 and 7.69 rural, peri urban) of the average utilizable feed DM yield tons per year per household from crop residues using 10% loss, respectively. On the other hand Amare (2006) and Mulu (2009) reported the positive balance for DM requirement in north Gondor and Bure Woreda of Amhara region. The positive value might indicate the small number of livestock population, fertility of the land and average moisture content the area.In cattle management, construction of animal was the most important. In the Central Rift valley, around Ziway the majority of farmers kept their in corral house (Zewdie, 2010). Whereas, in Boditi and Guraghe all most all households (80%) in rural or mixed crop/livestock system kept their cattle within family house because of the fear of thieves, to protect animals from extreme environmental hazards, while the minority (10%) the farmers used a separate shelter for their animals and open bar nor fences within their own compounds (Asrat et al., 2012 andAsrat et al., 2013); Abebe et al. 2012).Water plays a critical role in life. There are different sources of water body which used to cattle watering. According to the report of Gebrekidan and Zeleke (2014) pipe water was the major sources of water in urban area of in Tigray. Similarly, Sintayehu et al. (2008) showed comparable usage of water sources in which the majority of the urban dairy producers obtained water from pipe water. However, Asrat et al. (2013) in Boditi and Zewdie (2010) in Debre Birhan were reported that river as the main sources of water for watering livestock. Also lake was the main sources of water for watering livestock (Zewdie, 2010). Farmers who are far from the water source, trek long distances for water searching which causes weight loss of animals. Girma et al. (2009) indicated that animals consume less water if they have to travel further to the source.Dairy production is constrained by multifaceted factors, though the nature and magnitude of the problems vary between production systems and agro-ecologies. Some are cross-cutting that can have influence on dairy production regardless of dairy production system and agroecologies; others are system specific. Belay et al. (2012) and Abebe et al. (2014) listed land shortage, feed shortage, inefficient artificial insemination (AI) service and water shortage as the most important dairy production constraints in Jimma and Gurage Zone, respectively.Diseases such as lump skin diseases, mastitis, blackleg and foot and mouth diseases were the major diseases problems hampered dairy production. Azage et al. (2013) reported that pasteurolosis, lump skin disease, anthrax and black leg were major disease in the highland dairy system. Out of the whole diseases, mastitis was the most important diseases affecting milking cows through reduction in milk production especially in urban dairy production Among the listed diseases, anthrax, blackleg and foot and mouth diseases are the common outbreak occurred seasonally and the farmers and farmer used to vaccinate their animals before the outbreak.Problems related with reproductive performances were the major problems that affected dairy herds. The major problem of reproductive performance faced in dairy production systems were include long calving interval, abortion, late age at first maturity and low rate of conception (Asrat et al., 2013).There were also market related problems which includes distance from the markets place, shortage of milk and seasonal fluctuation in milk supply have been reported to be the major determinant across all the production systems (Azage et al., 2013).According to Derese (2008) unavailability of feed probably limit the milk production potential of cows with good milk producing ability more than any other single factor and is the most serious constraint to improve dairying in West Shoa Zone. Generally, market for dairy products was the major problems affecting dairy cattle production such as low price of milk during fasting period and higher cost of feed. This idea was similar with the reports of Adebabay (2009); Kassahun (2008); Sintayehu et al. (2008) and Million et al. (2014) in different parts of EthiopiaDairy marketing in the country can be categorized as informal and formal marketing system. The common marketing system identified in the current study was informal marketing system ( Belete et al.,2010 ;Dessalegn et al.,2013;Azage et al.,2013 andAbebe et al.,2014) were indicated that informal marketing systems as the dominant dairy marketing practices where they sell their products to neighbours and sale to itinerant traders or individuals in nearby towns or local markets. Also Zelalam et al. (2011) indicated that about 95% of the marketed milk at national level is channelled through the informal system. Whole milk, fermented milk, butter and cheese are common marketable product in the urban areas, whereas traditional butter and cheese are the most important dairy products used for marketing in rural dairy production systems. The recent finding by Million et al. (2014) showed that raw milk, butter and cheese are the most important dairy products used for marketing in urban dairy production system of Ada'a Liban Woreda. Milk and milk product marketing was affected by different factors. The main factors are shortage of milk, cultural restrictions (taboo) and lack of the market access are the most common (Sintayehu et al., 2008;Abebe et al., 2014) The study was conducted in Dugda district of East Shoa Zone, Oromia regional state. Dugda is part of the former woreda of Dugda Bora, at present divided into Bora and Dugda Woreda. It is located at 8° 10'N latitude and 38° 50'E longitude at an altitude ranges between 1500 -2300 meters above sea level (CSA, 2008).The capital town, Meki, is found 130 km on east south of Addis Ababa on the main road from Addis Ababa to Hawassa. The agro-ecology of the woreda is categorized as lowland (55 %) and dry woynadaga (45% From a total of 36 rural kebeles and 3 urban kebele of Dugda District, three rural, three Peri urban and two urban kebeles were selected using purposive sampling technique based on the accessibility and potential for dairy production. A multi stage sampling technique was used for the study. First dairy cattle holding farmers were clustered in to urban, peri urban and rural kebeles. Then, individual households having dairy cows of any breed and size was identified and listed. Finally, a total of 144 individual dairy cow owner households which included 36 from urban, 54 from peri urban and 54 dairy producers from rural dairy production systems were randomly selected from the list.For the three production systems a semi-structured questionnaire was prepared and pre-tested for its applicability before its commencement. Interview was done by the researcher together with the livestock experts and development agents from the respective livestock offices. These experts were used to assist as translators for the local language 'Oromifa' and as a local guide to lead to the selected farmers. The interviews were carried out at the farmer's home to enable counterchecking of the farmer's response with respect to the availability of feed resources, livestock population and species and the overall management system of the farm. A group discussion was also organized with purposively selected farmers, who had long experience and knowledge of livestock husbandry as well as with Kebeles administrative and development agent to identify and generalize livestock production constraints.The following data sets were collected using questionnaire: the socio-economic characteristics of dairy producers and the pattern of dairy production, consumption and marketing and the opportunities and challenges of dairy production. Data on feed resources availability and management, housing of dairy animals, breeding and watering activities was collected.Productive and reproductive performance of dairy cattle such as age at first calving, calving interval, lactation length, days open and number of service per conception was also collected.The quantity of feed dry matter obtainable from natural pastures were determined by multiplying the hectare under each land use category by their respective estimated annual DM yield per hectare tDM/ha (FAO, 1987). Conversion factors of 2.0, 0.5, 3.0, 1.8and 0.7 tDM/ha/year was used for natural pasture, aftermath, private grazing land, fallow land and forest/woody land, respectively.The quantity of available crop residues produced by farmers was estimated by applying grain to straw ratio as suggested by FAO (1987). Accordingly, for a ton of wheat, barley and teff straw, a multiplier of 1.5 was used for haricot bean straw a multiplier of 1.2 used ,for maize a and sorghum multiplier of 2.0 and 2.5 was used, respectively. Similarly, quantity of feed dry matter obtained from irrigation practices was estimated by multiplying the irrigated land size by 0.3tDM/ha/seasons (FAO, 1987).The quantity of potentially available crop residues for animal consumption was estimated by assuming 10% wastage (Adugna and Said, 1994).The quantity of industrial by product feed resources was estimated by interviewing the farmers with regard to the frequency and quantity purchased per month.Livestock populations per household were converted into Tropical Livestock Unit (TLU) as suggested by Gryseels (1988) for indigenous zebu cattle and Shifarew (1991) for crossbreds.The DM requirements for maintenance were calculated based on daily DM requirements of 250 kg dual-purpose tropical cattle (an equivalent of one TLU) according to Kearl(1982).Nutrients supplied by each feed types were estimated from the total DM output and nutrients content of that feed on DM basis.The data collected by semi-structured questionnaire was entered in to Microsoft excel for the purposes of data management. Descriptive statistics was employed to describe qualitative data using statistical procedures for social sciences (SPSS) version 16.0. Quantitative data such as reproductive and productive parameters were analyzed using the General Linear Model (GLM) procedure of the statistical Analysis System (SAS, 2004). Means with the same category were compared using the Least Significant Difference (LSD) when F test was found to be significant.The following mathematical model was used during data analysis.y ijk = µ+P i +S j +B k +e ijk Where, y ijk = the observed value of a dependent variables µ = overall mean P i = the effect of i th production system B k =the effect of k th management practices e ijk = random error With regard to family size, the average family size per household across the surveyed areas was 6.39±0.23 (Table 1). The family size in the urban dairy production was lower than the peri urban and rural dairy production system. The average number of males and females with in the household was lower for urban dairy production as compared to the peri urban and rural dairy production systems. The average family size composition by age group indicates that the majority of household members were within independent age categories across all dairy production systems. The mean number of family members categorized as dependent group per household headed was slightly lower in the urban production than in the peri urban and rural production system. The educational background of the households was better in urban dairy production system than Peri urban and rural dairy production systems. Thus, about 71 and11.1% of the household in urban production system had attended/joined primary school and higher education institution, respectively. The proportion of respondents who attended primary school in the three dairy productions exceeds the proportion of adult education, junior and high school levels. followers, respectively (Table 3). Livestock number varied among the three production systems. In urban dairy production system, total average livestock holding was significantly lower (6.52TLU) than the peri urban (8.86TLU) and rural production (12.58) systems. In terms of breed type, urban production system holds relatively large number of cross breed cattle whereas rural production system dominated by local breeds. Dairy cows are solely sources of milk in the study area.Accordingly, urban dairy production system was characterized by high milk producing cross breed cow in the study area while rural dairy production system holds low milk producing local cow. Means with the same rows different superscript was significantly different (P<0.05)In peri urban and rural dairy production systems, livestock were mainly raised to satisfy both milk and traction purpose, while the majority of household in urban keep their dairy cattle primarily for milk production (Table 5). About 94.4% and 50% of the respondents in the urban production system held cattle for milk production only and both milk and draught power, respectively. In the rural dairy production, the highest proportions of respondents (77.8%) keep cattle for both traction and milk purposes. In the study area, milking was fully accomplished by females in rural area, while in the urban dairy production system about 70.3 % of the households indicated that milking was done only by female and 29.7 % of the households indicated that milking was shared between both sexes (Table 6).Cattle herding was common in rural areas of the study. Therefore, about 87 % of interviewed households reported cattle herding activity were undertaken by adult male or children in rural areas.Barn cleaning was the responsibility of male across all dairy production systems as reported by the majority of the interviewed households. Accordingly, about 45.9%, 48.1 and 77 % of the respondents in urban, peri urban and rural dairy production systems were reported barn cleaning activity as the responsibility of male.Labour division varied among various dairy production systems and between household sexes for feed collection which depends on the availability of feed. Accordingly, about 79.5 % of respondents in urban and 83.3% of respondents in rural areas showed that feed collection is the only responsibility of male households. Similarly, about 74.1% in peri urban households indicated that this task can the completed by males.Milk and milk products marketing in most cases was performed by females (87.5%) in urban dairy, 96.3% in peri urban and it was as a whole job of females(100%) in rural dairy production systems. With regards to live animal marketing, about 77.4, 86.7 and 94% of the households indicated that live animal marketing is the responsibility of men in urban, peri urban and rural dairy, respectively. But, about 22.6 % of the households indicated that both men and women have equal responsibilities to participate in this task.In overall dairy production systems, the majority of the respondent reported that animal house construction is the responsibility of male in household head members. About 97.3%, 96.3 and 98.1% of interviewed households reported as animal house construction for males in urban, peri urban and rural dairy production systems, respectively. Out of the interviewed dairy producers in the rural dairy production system, the majority of the households (44.4%) used whole milk primarily for home consumptions and about 43.9 % for traditional processing (Table 7).In peri urban dairy production, about 42.2 and 42.1% of the respondents utilized milk for home consumption and home processing, respectively. On the other hand, the result in the urban system showed that the majority (43.3%) of the households produced milk primarily for sale. The majorities of the respondents reported that the highest proportions (74.3%) of milk was given for children and followed by vulnerable groups (14.6%) of the family members. Productive and reproductive performance of dairy cows in the study area was presented in the Table 8. The estimated milk yield for local breed did not shows significant difference (P>0.05) across all dairy production systems. However, there was significant difference between the two breed type which indicate higher value (P<0.05) for crossbreed across dairy production system.Variations among production systems might due to management level whereas variation between breed types was due to genetically variations.The estimated mean lactation length was significantly lower (P<0.05) in urban for local breeds as compared to peri urban and rural production systems. This is due to dairy producers in urban dairy production system was not focused on local breed for milk production rather than they used to obtained replacement cross breed heifers. On the other hand, local breed in peri urban and rural dairy production systems were higher due to their exploitation milk up to conception period. In fact, lactation length for cross breed cows in urban production system marked significantly higher (P<0.05) than the other production systems. Conversely, lactation length for crossbreed dairy cow was significantly higher (P<0.05) in urban than peri urban and rural dairy production systems. However, lower for peri urban and rural dairy production systems due to poor management practices. With regard to breed type average lactation length shows significant variation between breed types among production systems.The estimated mean ages at first calving for local and cross breeds in urban dairy were 39.00 and 27.84 months, respectively. Mean ages at first calving for both local and cross breeds were significantly shorter (P<0.05) as compared to peri urban and rural dairy production systems (Table 8). In rural dairy production system, the estimated mean age at first calving were significantly (P<0.05) longer as reported by the respondents. However, age at first calving for cross breed in peri urban and rural dairy production systems did not shows significant difference(P>0.05).Generally, age at first calving for cross breed was significantly lower due to genetically variations between the two type breeds.Estimated mean calving interval, in urban and peri urban production systems did not shows significant (P>0.05) whereas longer calving interval in rural production system for both local and cross breed cows. There was also significant difference (P<0.05) in length of calving interval between breeds types among the production systems. Variations between breed type and among production systems might be aroused from genetic and level of management practices among production systems. The overall mean number of service per conception was 1.52 and 1.80 for local and cross breeds, respectively. Number of service per conception did not shows marked difference (P >0.05) among production systems and between breeds types. Cleaning of the teats before milking contributes to hygienic milk production. As indicated in Table 14, about 94.4% of the households in urban dairy production system practiced teat washing before and after milking. However, it is not a common practice to wash teat before milking in the peri urban and rural dairy production systems. Accordingly, the proportion of farmers washing teats was few in peri urban (27.8%) and rural dairy production system (5.6%)with the assumption that teats are cleaned when the calf suckles before milking.With regard to type and milk utensils, the majority (63.9%) of urban dairy households used plastic milk utensils and about 53.7% of the peri urban and 59.2% rural producers used clay pot and plastics. Almost all of the urban producers (97.2%) usually clean their milking utensils before and after milking. However, more than half (57.4%) of peri urban and 20.4 % of rural producers washed milking utensils before and after milking. Considering personal hygiene all of the interviewed respondents in urban dairy production system washed their hand before milking. About 31.5 and 9.3% of household in peri urban and rural areas washed their hand before milking, respectively. Bargemo adi (Eucalyptus globulus) was used for washing utensils and Ejersa (Olea africana) was used for smoking to improve the flavor of their products. Milk processing method across all the dairy production systems is traditional home processing method. In the urban system, the major dairy product was fermented milk (30.6%) followed by butter (25%) and cottage cheese (19.5%) Unlike urban dairy production system, majority of the households in peri urban (88.9 %) processed milk into butter, whereas for 55.6% and 35.2 % of the household cottage cheese and fermented milk were the main products, respectively.Similarly, in the rural dairy production system butter was the primary products for 92.6 % of the households, fermented milk 75.6% of the households.Figure 1Variations of processed milk among dairy production systems in the study areaThe most important sources of animal feeds in the natural pasture. The most important types of crop residues frequently used in the study area are maize stover, wheat straws and followed by teff commonly used as feed resources.the respondents in rural area, whe urban practiced crop aftermath gra the households, fermented milk for 57.4% the households and cottage cheese for the remaining Variations of processed milk among dairy production systems in the study areamost important sources of animal feeds in the study area were crop residues followedThe most important types of crop residues frequently used in the study area are wheat straws and followed by teff straw. Grazing own pasture and communal land commonly used as feed resources. Crop aftermath grazing was also used by the higher proportion of the respondents in rural area, where as only about 22.2 and 37% of the respondents in the peri urban practiced crop aftermath grazing during rainy and dry seasons.  The type and amount of DM obtainable from available major feed resource is presented in Tables 12. The average utilizable feed DM yield per household from crop residues was 0.52, 7.88 and 8.67 ton per annum by using 10% loss for urban, peri urban and rural kebele, respectively. The mean annual utilizable dry matter production from different type of feed resources was estimated to be 6, 11.69 and 16.5 tDM for urban, peri urban and rural production systems, respectively. The mean feed dry matter produced per household in rural areas was higher than that of feed DM in urban and peri urban kebeles. This is due to lack of grazing land and crop residues in urban production system. As reported in the Table 13, the average annual utilizable feed DM supply was estimated to be 5.39, 12.17 and 16.5 tDM per household for urban, peri urban and rural production system, respectively. Based on Kearl (1982) recommendation, the estimated values of annual feed dry matter requirements for maintenance for urban, peri urban and rural areas was 9.44, 14.43 and 18.24 tDM, respectively. Accordingly, the annual utilizable feed dry matter satisfied about 57.34, 84.34 and 90.46% of the livestock maintenance requirements for urban, peri urban and rural kebeles, respectively. This result indicated that the feed shortage was more severe in urban dairy production systems due to lack of grazing lands. The majority (58.9%) of the interviewed respondents kept their cattle in open barns. However, 13.3 and 14.5 % of the respondents kept their cattle in the house that have stone floor with roof and mud floor with roof, respectively. In the rural dairy production systems about 87.0% of respondents used open barn where as about 75.9% of the peri urban and 13.9 % urban respondents use open barn. The majority of interviewed households in peri urban (46.3%) and rural production (33.3%) systems got water for livestock from Lake Ziway. However, about 61.1% of the respondent in urban dairy production system reported that pipe water was the main sources of water for their dairy cattle. Despite the smaller contribution of other water sources, water shortage is the major constraint during the dry season for kebeles located far away from Lake Ziway and Main River.As indicated in Table 15, in the urban dairy production system dairy farmers did not trek their animals to distant places due to watering at home. With regards to watering frequency about77.8, 81.5 and 92.6% of the households in urban, peri urban and rural areas water their dairy cattle once per day, respectively. The nature and magnitude of the constraints were varying among dairy production systems.Dairy producers in the studied areas prioritized the major problems in the following order: feed shortage, diseases problems, high price of feeds, problems related to market availability, inefficient breeding, capital shortage and high price of medicaments. According to the respondents feed shortage was the main constraints followed by disease and feed price. Household in peri urban and rural dairy production systems highly stressed seasonal variation in feed availability as the main problem, whereas in urban production system the majority of dairy producers were highly influenced by the high price of feeds Market availability and lack of market information have been reported to be the fourth major problems in the current study. Thus, in the rural dairy production system milk marketing is a common problem due to cultural restrictions, distance to markets, shortage of milk and seasonal fluctuation in milk supply were the major determinant across all production systems.Breed and reproductive related constraints such as delayed age at first mating, low calving rate and long calving interval are the most important problems in the current study. Although artificial insemination service is available in most urban production system, it is less available for most peri-urban and almost all in rural dairy production system.The consequences of feed shortage for livestock in all dairy production system in the study areas was characterized by lower milk yield, weight loss, mortality and absence of heat and abortion (Table 17). Overall, decreased milk yield (41.7%) and weight loss (30.5%) and lack of sign of estruses (21.9%) shares the largest percentage consequences of feed shortage on the performances of animals. In urban dairy production system the majority (69.4%) of dairy farmers used purchased supplement feeds, while the majority of households in peri urban dairy farmers provided feed for their livestock in small quantity. The majority of households in rural dairy production feed from the stock of the rainy seasons (33.3%) as mitigation measures. Selling the animal -1.9 3.7Use nonconventional feeds 13.9 5.5 5.5Total 100 100 100As indicated in Table 19, the majority of urban dairy farmers (75%) primarily produced whole milk for sale, whereas11.1, 8.3, and 5.6% of the households produced butter, fermented milk and local cheese, respectively, as primary dairy products for sale. However, the majority of the respondents in peri-urban (90.7%) and rural dairy production (96.3%) system produced butter as the predominant dairy product for sale .A few number of dairy producer in peri urban produced whole milk for sale (3.4) and local cheese (5.6%). The overall mean age of the household in the current study was higher than the mean value of 39.7years reported by Kedija (2007) in Mieso districts and 36.7 years reported by Teshome (2009) in the North Western of Ethiopia. However, higher mean values of 46.4 and 51.9 years were reported in Hawassa and Shashamane by Sintayehu et al. (2008), respectively. Also Belete (2006) and Belete et al. (2010) reported the mean values of44.6 and 44 years in Fogora Woreda, respectively.The overall mean family size of the studied households was comparable with the value of average family size of 6.2 persons per household in Ada'a and Lume districts (Kassahun, 2008), 6 people per household in Gurage Zone of southern Ethiopia (Abebe et.al, 2014) and Wolayita Zone (CSA, 2011). Lower average family size (4.66 people household) was reported by Bilatu et al. (2013) in East shoa zone of Ada'a and Lume districts areas. However, higher average family size of 8.2 and 7.2 was reported by Asaminew and Eyasu (2009) in northern part of Ethiopia, Bahir Dar zuria and Mecha districts, respectively. Even if, the higher average family size per household was reported in the Northern part of Ethiopia, the higher proportion of independent family member in the current study was important for availability of family labour for different dairy activities.In terms of educational level Dugda Woreda has higher proportion of educated person per household than the report of Kedija (2007) who indicated that only 15% the household read and write and very few household (4.2%) in the Mieso district joined elementary school. Higher proportion of educational level is an important tool to bring fast and sustainable development and had roles in affecting household income, adopting technologies, health, and as a whole the socio-economic status of the family as well. This might had a good contribution to adopt technologies in the study area.With regard to religious character, in the current study the percentage value of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian follower was lower than the previous report in Ada'a (87.5%) and in Lume (91.4) by Kassahun (2013) in East Ada'a and Lume districts of Shoa Zone. This indicated that the presence of large proportion of Orthodox can negatively affect the demand for milk and milk products during the fasting season. Ethiopian Orthodox Church abstain the followers for 200 days annually from milk consumption then as result the consumption/the demand for animal products goes down. This shown that fasting was the major reason for milk consumption variation in Ada'a and Lume districts (Bilatu et al., 2013). Also UNIDO (2009) reported that the extended fasting periods of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian church highly affects the demand for milk in the country.Livestock holding play the vital role in the study areas. Having huge number of livestock especially in the rural area, the owners considered to be wealth and respected person. Today, overall percentage of livestock in the study area was higher than the average value of livestock structure per household by Sintayehu et al. (2008) in Shashamane-Dilla areas. The predominant livestock species compositions kept in the current study area include cattle, sheep, goats and donkey where the average tropical livestock for cattle in the district was the highest. This was similar with report of Asrat et al. (2013) in the Southern part of Ethiopia Regarding milk production, local and cross breed dairy cattle were the only sources of milk.This finding was in agreement with the report of Abebe et al. (2014) in Gurage Zone of Southern Ethiopia who reported that cattle are only important source of milk. However, camel and goats are the sources of milk in addition to dairy cow in Mieso district (Kedija, 2007;CSA, 2014). For instance, out of a total national annual milk production, about 81.2% was obtained from cattle (CSA, 2009). The rural dairy production system in the studied area was dominated by low producing local breed cows and very few cross breeds. This finding is in line with national livestock survey (CSA, 2014) which has shown that about 98.71% of cattle in Ethiopia were indigenous local breeds, while the rest (1.15% and 0.14%) are hybrid and cross breed, respectively.Livestock keeping had multipurpose role in the study area. In the urban and peri urban production system, farmer kept their cattle mainly to satisfy both the need of milk production and traction purpose. This finding was in agreement with the finding of Sintayehu et al. (2008) who reported that farmers in the rural areas kept female cattle to produce milk for household consumption and male calves to assist the crop production by providing draught power.However, the majorities of household in urban dairy production system keep their cows only for the purpose of milk production. This is in line with the report of Zewdie (2010) who indicated that about 90% and 95% of households keep their cow for milk production in Sebeta and Jima, respectively. Generally, livestock keeping play a great role for providing meat, input for crop production and used for fuel production. This result was in harmony with the idea of LOL ( 2010) which state that livestock production performs many functions in household economy by providing food, input for crop production and soil fertility management. Moreover, Asrat et al. (2013) reported that farmers used cattle as an asset that can readily be converted into cash needed for the purchase of farm inputs like fertilizers and improved seeds for the next crop production cycle.Division of family labour and role of gender in dairying varies among three dairy production systems in the study area. The dominant source of labour across the production systems is family labour. The experience in the rural dairying system of the current study showed that female household had the responsibility in milking dairy cows. This is contrary to the findings reported for the rural highland dairy production systems of Fogera and Bure, where milking is the responsibility of adult males followed by women, boys and hired labour (Belete et al., 2010). In the urban dairy production system of Debrezeit, however, women are responsible for milking of cows (Million et al., 2014). Similarly, in the urban and peri-urban dairy production system of Shashemene-Dilla milk shed, milking is predominantly handled by women (Sintayehu et al., 2008).In the current study, cattle herding were carried out mainly by male family members of the household head. This was in line with the report of Zewdie (2010) who indicated that cattle herding was mainly performed by male in Jima and Sebeta. Based on the availability of feed, feed collection was mainly the responsibility of male family member. This finding was in agreement with the report of Kedija (2007) and Zewdie (2010) who indicated that feed collection activities were largely performed by male in Mieso district and Central Rift valley, respectively.Milk and milk products marketing was the responsibly of female household in most cases in the study area. However, in the case of Debrezit urban dairy production systems, the son had a major responsibly (40.5%) followed by daughters (24.3%) and employed person (16.2%) for dairy products marketing (Million et al., 2014). However, live animal marketing was the responsibility of male in the current study area which is not consistent with the finding of Kedija (2007) who indicated that the responsibility to marketing live animal was both men and women.Barn cleaning was the responsibility of male in the current study area which was in disagreement with the finding by Belete et al. (2010) who reported that barn cleaning was the responsibility given to women by the majority of respondent in Fogora Woreda.In the rural dairy production system of the studied area, the majority of the households (44.4%), used whole milk primarily for home consumptions, while slightly less amount of milk produced was processed (traditional) in to products (43.9%). However, the recent finding by Azage et al. (2013) in the rural highland dairy production system of Fogera woreda indicated that about 20.6% of daily milk produced was consumed by the households, while 65.5% is processed into milk products and used for home consumption and sale.On the other hand, the household in urban production system of the current study revealed that the higher proportion of milk produced (43.3%) was sold. According to Bilatu et al .(2013) about 94% of the milk produced in East shoa Zone (Ada'a and Lume districts) was sold while only 6% was retained for home consumption. Kassahun (2008) also indicated that the highest amount of milk was allocated for sale in the same study area. Nigussie (2006) also reported that 79% of the milk produced by urban dairy farmers in Mekele area of Northern region was marketed. There were many factors that affected milk consumption. Previous studies in different parts of the country showed that during fasting period's demand of dairy product is getting lower than non-fasting time (Kassahun, 2008). Availability and consumption of these products was high immediately after fasting as most of the milk during fasting period is processed into other dairy products for later sales and consumptionIn the study area, the majorities of the respondents reported that the highest proportions of milk consumption was given for children and followed by male household heads. This finding is comparable with thee report of Lemma and Mekonnin (2015) children were the first priority followed by husband in Ada and Gimbichu districs.The overall mean daily milk yield obtained for crossbred cow was closer to the report of Zewdie (2010) and Yitaye (2008) who estimated an overall average daily milk yield of 7.6 l and 7.8 kg/cow/day in Central Rift Valley and for Borana crossbred cows in urban and peri-urban areas of North Western Highlands, respectively. However, the present finding was lower than the previous reports by Belay et al.( 2012) from crossbred dairy cows (8.52 liters) in Jimma Town of Oromia region and Kefalegn et al. (2014) who reported an average milk yields of 10.70,11.11 and 11.88 lit in Adama, Lume and Ada'a, respectively.With regard to daily milk yield obtained from local breed cows, the average milk yield obtained was higher than the national average which was 1.37 litre (CSA, 2014) and that of Kedija (2007) who reported 1.2 kg/day/cow for local zebu breed in Meiso .However, the overall mean estimated milk yield in the current study areas was slightly lower than the value reported by Zewudie (2010) and Kefelegn et al. (2014) in crop livestock areas of Central Ethiopia.Similarly, in the other areas of the country, higher mean daily milk yield of 2.2 lit/day (Ulfina et al., 2013) in Western part of Oromia and 1.8 lit/day (Abebe et al., 2014) in southern part of Ethiopia was reported. Adugna and Aster (2007) also reported 2.2 lit/day/cow of milk for Boran breed in Borana Zone for local cows. For both breed type, the difference might be associated to feed shortage and poor quality of the available feed. Million and Tadelle (2003) conclude that indigenous breeds of cattle are low yielders under poor management conditions.The average values of lactation length in the current finding in urban dairy production system was comparable with the reports of Adugna and Aster (2007) in Borana Zone for Boran breed and Kedija (2007) for local zebu breed in Mieso district who reported 7.3 months. Also the values recorded in peri urban and rural dairy production systems was nearly similar with the value reported by Lemma et al. (2005) which was about 9.5 months for Arsi zebu breed.The reported average lactation length of cross breed cows in the current study was lower than the mean value recorded in many literatures. Lemma and Mekonnin (2015) found an average lactation length per month of which varied from 9.32 to 11.66 month for crossbreed for at the three location of East Shoa Zone (Ada'a, Gimbichu and Boset). Also in other parts of the country Deresse (2009) reported 9.97 and 10.1 months for urban and peri urban farms, respectively. Mulugeta and Belayneh (2013)   (Zewdie, 2010).Similarly, Abebe et al. (2014) in the Southern of the country reported higher values of calving interval for local breed cows.On the other hand, the observed calving interval for cross breed cow in the present study is in agreement with the report by Kefelegn et al. (2014)  The two types of animal breeding systems were practiced in the study area. In peri urban and rural dairy production system, most of the households used natural mating, while only few households used the combination of natural mating and artificial insemination. A few number of households who had crossbreed cows used AI.A similar result was reported by Sintayehu et al. (2008) in Shashamane-Dilla of Southern Ethiopia who indicated that about 81.7% of household used local bull for mating, while about (10%) used AI.On the other hand, the majority of dairy producers in urban dairy production systems used artificial insemination. This result is in accordance with the report of Gebrekidan and Zeleke (2014) who shown that about 77.21% of the respondents use AI services. Furthermore, the research conducted by Million et al. (2014) in Ada'a Liban woredas indicated that artificial insemination was main breeding systems for all households in urban dairy production systems.Relatively higher proportion of the households was using AI services in peri urban dairy production system of the current finding. This is due to the fact that dairy producers in urban and peri urban areas had better awareness than the respondents in rural areas in using AI services.With regard to the sources of mating bulls, the majority of the farmers in the study area used their own bulls, while small number of the farmers used neighbour's bull and private cross breed bull. This is in consistent with the finding of Belete(2006) who indicated that the majority of the household in Fogora Woreda breed their cows by their own bull(43.6%) followed by neighbour bull(41.5%) and the rest(5.2%) breed with crossbreed bull. In contrary, most of the farmers in the rural lowland system of Metema (73%) did not have their own bulls where they rely on neighbour bulls (39.5%) and use open mating in communal grazing (33.5%) (Azage et al.,2013). households who practiced grazing natural pasture were higher in peri urban and rural areas, whereas urban dairy producers mainly depends on zero grazing. This was due to the expansion of urbanization and agricultural activities are the main reasons why the access of grazing land absent in urban dairy producers.Among crop residues, wheat straws, maize stover, and teff straws were mostly used by the majority of households in the peri urban and rural dairy production system and followed by haricot bean and barley straws. This is similar to Azage et al. (2013) who reported that teff, wheat and barley straw and maize stovers are important feed resources in the rural highland system of Bure and Fogera. Similarly, Zewdie (2010) reported that crop residues such as maize stover, wheat straw, teff straw, haricot bean straw and barley straw were the major feed resources in Central Rift Valley.Contrary to this, the majority of dairy producers in the urban production system use purchased agro industrial by products feeds from different sources and used some crop residues such asIn the current study, the annual utilizable feed DM satisfied about 90.72% of the livestock maintenance requirement for rural area which is lower than the report of Dawit et al. (2013) who reported the value of 99% in Adami Tullu Jido Kombolcha. This result indicated that there is feed shortage in the study area. The negative balance in this finding was in line the observation of Dawit et al. (2013) and Zewde (2010) in the Central rift valley of Ethiopia.However, the positive value for DM requirement reported by Amare (2006) and Mulu (2009) in north Gondor and Bure woreda might be because of the small livestock population and fertility of the land.From the interviewed household, the majority of the respondents in overall production systems who reported that all most all households (80%) in rural or mixed crop/livestock system kept their cattle within family house because of the fear of thieves, to protect animals from extreme environmental hazards, while the minority (10%) the farmers used a separate shelter for their animals and open bar nor fences within their own compounds.Sources of water in the study area varied among dairy production systems. In urban dairy production of the current study, the majority of household used pipe water for watering their livestock. This finding was in agreement with the report of Gebrekidan and Zeleke (2014) who reported pipe water as the major sources of water in urban area of in Tigray. Similarly, Sintayehu et al. (2008) showed comparable usage of water sources in which the majority of the urban dairy producers obtained water from pipe water. However, in the overall dairy production of the current study, lake was the main sources of water for watering livestock. This finding was in disagreement with the report of Asrat et al. (2013)  Frequency of watering to dairy animals varies from one production system to another. In the current study, the majority of the households in the production systems water their cattle once. This is similar with the report of Asrat et al. (2013) who reported that about 71.6% of interviewed households water their cattle once a day.Problems related with the shortage of feeds and purchasing costs are the key factors in the study areas. The majority of dairy producers in the study area ranked feed shortage and purchasing cost as the main constraints. This was in agreement with the finding of Sintayehu (2008) who reported that about 55 and 73% of producers in the mixed crop-livestock and the urban system highly stressed the problem of seasonal variation in availability and the high price of feeds. As indicated by the respondents, milk production is constrained primarily by shortage of feed and prioritized as the serious problems. The result was comparable with report by Derese(2008) in West Shoa Zone who indicated that unavailability of feed probably limit the milk production potential of cows with good milk producing ability more than any other single factor and is the most serious constraint to improve dairying.Diseases are also the most important factors affecting milk production. Mastitis is the most important diseases affecting milking cows through reduction in milk production especially in urban dairy production. A similar result was reported by Milliom et al. (2014), in Ada'a Liban Woredas who reported mastitis as the most economic loss for the majority of dairy producers through reduction in milk yield.The cost of concentrates feeds was unaffordable for the majority of the farmers in peri urban and rural dairy production. This is in consistent with the report of Gebrekidan and Zeleke (2014) that depicted that the majority of the farmers faced with the unfair prices of concentrates because the majority of urban dairy producers rely on concentrate feeds for increased milk yield.Regarding market related constraints, across all production systems milk marketing is a common problem, being the highest for the rural followed by peri urban dairy production systems. This finding is in agreement with the report of Azage et al (2013) who reported that lack of training in milk handling and marketing, lack of access to market, cultural taboo to sell milk, spoilage of milk and high transport cost were the major reasons for weak market access.Generally, market for dairy products was the major problems affecting dairy cattle production such as low price of milk during fasting period and higher cost of feed. This idea was similar with the reports of Adebabay (2009); Kassahun (2008); Sintayehu et al. (2008) and Million et al. (2014) in different parts of Ethiopia Breed and reproductive related constrained the majority of dairy farmers in the peri urban and rural production system. The research conducted in the current study is in accordance with the finding of Abebe et al. (2014) in Guraghe Zone and Sintayehu et al. (2008) in Shashamane-Dilla area who reported the unavailability of AI services as constraint which hindered genetic improvement in different dairy production system. Derese (2008) concluded that artificial insemination service provision has not been successful to improve reproductive performance of the countries dairy industry. Problems related with reproductive performances were also identified as the major problems that affected dairy herds. This is in agreement with the report of Asrat et al. (2013) who reported that calving interval, abortion and late age at first maturity as the serious problem that affected the performances of dairy cattle.The consequences of feed shortage for livestock in the production systems include weight loss, lower milk yield, mortality, abortion and absence of heat. The degree of this consequence varies according to production systems. In the current study, reduction of milk yield and animals weight loss was the serious problems. This finding was in agreement with Zewdie (2010) who indicated that decreased milk yield and weight loss of animals was the main consequences of shortage of feed in the Central Rift Valley of Ethiopia. Similarly, Derese (2008) reported that unavailability of feed limit the milk production potential of cows with good milk producing ability more than any other single factor.There were different mitigation options among household throughout dairy production systems.The strategy they practiced varies among household as well as production systems. The major mitigation option such as feed from the stock of the rainy season, give feed in smaller quantity,give less feed to certain type of animals, purchase crop residues, purchase supplement feeds, selling the animal and using nonconventional feed were identified in the study area. This finding is in line with the report of Gebrekidan and Zeleke (2014) who indicated that mitigation option such as feed from the stock of the rainy seasons, provision in small quantity of feed, use less amount of feed for certain type of animals and selling of the animal was used as possible as mitigation option in urban and peri urban areas of the Northern part of Ethiopia. In the same manner Zewdie (2010) reported using farm produced crop residue, purchase supplement, purchase crop residues and using nonconventional feed as the major mitigation measures in the Central RiftValley. Moreover, from the personal observation during the supervision, it was observed that some farmers were practicing mixing of atella with the crop residues to soften it and increase its palatability.Dairy marketing in the country can be categorized as informal and formal marketing system.The common marketing system identified in the current study was informal marketing system .This observation is comparable with the report of Belete et al.(2010) ;Dessalegn et al. (2013); Azage et al.(2013) and Abebe et al. (2014) who indicated that informal marketing systems was the dominant dairy marketing practices where they sell their products to neighbours and sale to itinerant traders or individuals in nearby towns or local markets. Similarly, Zelalam et al.(2011) indicated that about 95% of the marketed milk at national level is channelled through the informal system.However, the sale of fresh whole milk was not a common practice in the rural areas because of different reasons. The lack of sale of whole milk in the current studied area is in line with the report of Sintayehu et al. (2008) and Abebe et al. (2014) who indicated that shortage of milk, cultural restrictions (taboo) and lack of the market access are the most common. Whole milk, fermented milk, butter and cheese are common marketable product in the urban areas, whereas traditional butter and cheese are the most important dairy products used for marketing in rural dairy production systems. The recent finding by Million et al. (2014) showed that raw milk, butter and cheese are the most important dairy products used for marketing in urban dairy production system of Ada'a Liban Woreda.The study was conducted in Dugda district of East Shoa Zone in eight Kebeles which categorized into the three production systems, namely the urban, peri urban and rural dairy production systems. Among the production systems, urban production system was characterized by having relatively large number of crossbreed, better management and has no access to farmlands where most of the time and depends on purchased feeds. However, peri urban and rural dairy production system was extensive and largely depends on grazing lands and crop residues. Cattle in the peri urban and rural production system had multipurpose use, while dairy cows in urban production systems were mainly kept for milk production. Family labour was the major source of labour for performing dairy activities where the majority of milk related activities were the responsibility of women in the production systems. Dairy cows milking and milk marketing were the responsibility of women whereas cattle herding, feed collection, house construction and live animal marketing were the responsibility of the male as reported by the majority of the respondents.The most important feed resources identified in the study area included crop residues, grazing land, crop aftermath in peri urban and rural area, whereas purchased supply feed was the major feed for urban dairy production system. The most important types of crop residues frequently used in the study area were maize stover, wheat straw and followed by teff straw. Grazing own pasture and communal land was also commonly used as feed resources.The major constraints for dairy development in the area included unavailability and high costs of feeds, shortage capita, marketing problems, and lack of improved dairy animals, underdeveloped animal health services, processing and marketing. ","tokenCount":"12132"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"eb336896d3d215902d557de2975f5788","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://repository.cimmyt.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/55e928fe-2297-4c46-81a4-0517ce9e790f/content","id":"156456562"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"211674f6-a659-4b91-a957-f24a4e07816a","pagecount":"1","content":"Wheat blast is a devastating fungal disease threatening agricultural productivity and food security in the Americas and South Asia. First identified in Brazil in 1984, it spread to Bangladesh in 2016, prompting the government to request scientists for an early warning system.Blast disease has the potential to reduce wheat production by up to 85 million tons in BangladeshA projected $13 million loss in farmers' profits each year when an outbreak occurs.Blast can spread through infected seed, but most infection results from airborne spores spread by the wind.These spores are then deposited on leaves and wheat heads. Foggy weather or rainfall can also cause infectious spores to fall from the atmosphere and infect wheat.November December January February MarchThe lesion sporolates Spores float up into the atmosphereTemperature between 15 and 27˚C Humidity is above 93%For more information please visitFor more information feel free to write to Timothy J. Krupnik of CIMMYT at [email protected], Mazharul Aziz, DAE at [email protected], M A Mannan, BMD at [email protected] , Md Israil Hossain, BWMRI at [email protected] and Jose Mauricio Cunha Fernandes, UFP and EMBRAPA at [email protected] pm 03:00 A new digital early warning system can help extension officers and farmers get ahead.Weather forecast grids are integrated with spore population growth simulations and generate location-specific -5day warnings of blast outbreak risks.The system is being rolled out across Bangladesh and Brazil to deliver real-time disease updates to extension workers and smallholder farmers via text and email.The publication is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and do not necessarily reflect the view of USAID or the United States Government.","tokenCount":"285"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"5335a2904ad129c8f3b11c656dd5eefe","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/1d6185be-50fa-4a57-a72c-007da7993435/retrieve","id":"1610889721"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"81c7810a-6fe0-4f7d-9e2d-88a86d363662","pagecount":"13","content":"Zhe Guo and Upeksha HettiarachchiWe present an application of the method to the Thoria watershed in India. We analyze land cover changes in the Thoria watershed between the years 2000, 2020 and future scenarios, and subsequently map the above-ground carbon stock using the InVEST model along with remotely sensed data. The land use products and above-ground carbon stock modelling results can be used by diverse stakeholders to support land use planning, especially decisions around how to allocate land resource to balance food production, carbon sequestration, and other ecosystem services provided by common lands.The Thoria watershed, located in Rajasthan, spans 4500 hectares with a semi-arid climate. It consists of seven villages, featuring undulating topography and a population of 8100 across 1567 households. About 10% belong to scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The area comprises 1413 hectares of cultivated land, with 56.7% being rainfed and 44.3% irrigated. Initiated in 1996, the Foundation for Ecological Security undertook Common Land Development projects, starting in the Thoria watershed and extending to other areas. The focus is on land and water conservation activities to address challenges and improve livelihoods sustainably.The primary land cover maps for the Thoria water basin were derived from the Global Land Cover and Land Use Change datasets of 2000 and 2020 (Potapov et al., 2022). These maps were generated using Landsat archive data processing and characterization techniques that enhanced the precision and thematic detail of land cover and land use information. These datasets offer information at a spatial resolution of 30 meters, with a particular focus on major land cover categories, including forest extent and height, cropland, built-up areas, and surface water for the years 2000 and 2020.Technical Report In 2019, a detailed dataset assessed above-ground biomass and carbon in the Thoria watershed. The watershed's land-use map was subdivided into 30\" x 30\" grids, ensuring representation of over 5% of total grids. Sampling covered diverse vegetation components, and multiple plots were strategically chosen for a comprehensive landscape representation. Biomass estimation used established methods (Brown, 1997), considering parameters like diameter at breast height (DBH) and height. Each sample's biomass included all vegetation types. For aboveground carbon stock, 45% of calculated biomass was allocated, following methodologies (Murthy et al., 2015). The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) quantifies green vegetation by normalizing Near Infrared and red wavelengths. Ranging from -1 to 1, it serves as a reliable indicator for various land cover types. Sentinel-2 imagery, a collaboration involving ESA, the European Commission, and USGS, offers high-resolution 13-band imagery, updated daily. The raw NDVI is computed as NIR -Red divided by NIR + Red. This high-resolution NDVI data categorizes land cover types into high and low NDVI classes, helping capture the spatial distribution of biomass and carbon storage. The Thoria water basin originally had five primary land cover categories: woodland and tree cover, waste land, cropland, built-up areas, and water bodies. Field visits revealed significant spatial heterogeneity within these categories, emphasizing the need for a detailed assessment. To capture nuances in above-ground carbon storage, we utilized the NDVI layer, known for its correlation with ground vegetation. In 2020, a 5-day composite of 10-meter NDVI from Sentinel was processed to capture fine-scale spatial variations. The high-resolution NDVI product was crucial in revealing significant heterogeneity within land cover types, enhancing the precision of carbon storage estimates. We employed NDVI classes from high-resolution Sentinel datasets, designating values above 0.4 as \"NDVI high\" and below as \"NDVI low.\" This approach allows for a finer classification of land cover types, considering specific characteristics of above-ground carbon storage and addressing spatial heterogeneity. This refined method better captures the interplay between land cover and carbon dynamics in the Thoria water basin.Generating scenarios is complex but essential (Berg et al., 2016). The InVEST scenario generator tool facilitates a change-oriented perspective, guided by two identified scenarios: a 20% cropland expansion and a corresponding 20% wooded land/tree cover expansion from 2020. Using a proximity-based scenario generator, diverse spatial configurations of land use changes are produced. This tool allows users to specify conversion possibilities, spatial patterns based on proximity, and generate scenarios like pasture encroachment, agricultural expansion, and forest fragmentation. Resultant land-use maps inform InVEST carbon models, aiding in estimating carbon storage and sequestration, crucial for managing carbon resources and ecosystem services.The specific settings for the two defined scenarios are as follows:1. 20% Expansion of Cropland: Expands from the edge towards the center, allowed into wooded land and waste land but avoiding existing built-up areas.2. 20% Expansion of Wooded Land and Tree Cover: Similar to cropland expansion, occurring from the edge towards the center, including cropland and waste land but avoiding existing built-up areasIn addition to land cover datasets, georeferenced ground truth data is overlaid with refined land cover maps to provide aboveground land cover types and their corresponding carbon stock. This allows precise calculation at the pixel level, ensuring accurate estimations for distinct land cover categories.InVEST, a spatial modeling suite, assesses ecosystem service tradeoffs from land use changes. Its Carbon Storage and Sequestration model uses land use maps and aboveground carbon stock data in four primary pools: aboveground biomass, belowground biomass, soil, and dead organic matter. The model estimates current carbon storage and sequestration rates, mapping onto Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) rasters, summarizing results in raster outputs for storage, sequestration, and value.Estimates for each LULC type enhance the model's completeness. The study focuses on above-ground carbon storage from 2000 to 2020 and two future scenarios, applying InVEST to understand temporal evolution and spatial distribution patterns. The model considers the market or social value of sequestered carbon, its annual rate of change, and applies a discount rate to estimate the ecosystem service value to society, contributing to a nuanced understanding of land cover types and their carbon contributions.NPP data from MODIS satellite imagery is confined to the Thoria region, enabling a 20-year assessment of vegetation productivity. Fig. 5 shows a consistent upward trajectory in NPP, indicating an overall increase despite temporal fluctuations. The trendline analysis reveals a substantial and significant enhancement in NPP from approximately 1000 to 2500 over the 20-year period. This underscores the dynamics of vegetation productivity in Thoria, emphasizing temporal nuances within the broader increasing trend. Table 1 provides a comprehensive overview of land cover types and their areas in square kilometers for 2000 and 2020.Categories, such as \"Built-up,\" \"Cropland,\" \"Wasted land,\" \"Water,\" and \"Wooded and tree,\" are divided into high and low NDVI categories. The table illustrates significant changes in land cover patterns over the two-decade period. Using the 2020 land cover map as a baseline, two scenarios are visualized in Fig. 8 and Fig. 9. The first scenario involves a 20% cropland expansion, while the second entails a 20% increase in the wooded land and tree class. Generated using a proximitybased scenario generator with multiple iterations, the simulation concluded after 20% of the area underwent specified growth.The maps depict the spatial distribution of land cover types under these scenarios, providing insights into potential changes in aboveground carbon stock resulting from cropland expansion and increased wooded land and tree cover. These visualizations offer a comprehensive view of how land cover changes may influence carbon dynamics in the landscape.Fig. 7 The land cover map of scenario with 20% more cropland class from 2020.Fig. 8 The land cover map of scenario with 20% more wooded land and tree classes from 2020Field measurements provide comprehensive ground truth data for the entire basin, covering all 10 land cover types. Despite some types having limited observations, mean values of carbon stock for each land cover type are used due to constraints in the number of data points. The outcomes for above-ground biomass and carbon stock estimation for each land cover type are presented in Table 2.  Table 3 displays the total carbon stock in tons for various time frames and scenarios. In 2000, the total carbon stock was 2,669.86 tons, slightly decreasing to 2,583.07 tons by 2020. Two alternative scenarios were considered: a 20% expansion of cropland resulting in a total carbon stock of 2,533.15 tons, and a 20% expansion of wooded land and tree cover resulting in a total carbon stock of 2,602.05 tons. These values illustrate changes in carbon stock over time and showcase the potential impact of land use alterations on carbon storage in the study area. This study presents a novel GIS-based methodology that leverages freely available open data and tools to assess the provision of climate-regulation ecosystem services in the Thoria region of India. The approach involves refining the existing land cover map by integrating high-resolution vegetation indices and conducting assessments of carbon stock for the years 2000 and 2020, as well as under two distinct customized scenarios. The methodology has demonstrated its effectiveness in conducting a comprehensive study at the watershed level, with the potential for replication across various scales of analysis.We found that despite rapid urbanization over the last 20 years, carbon stocks remained relatively stable -possibly due to successful reforestation activities. The research points to how nature-positive solutions can be designed and measured at scale. The research also lays the foundation for global studies to promote a deeper understanding of ecosystem services and sustainable land management.","tokenCount":"1516"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"249864772e37f47990ea02ef6ee10995","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/ee88032c-4f7b-431c-8308-360b226d6919/retrieve","id":"181846892"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"120a64c1-ec0d-4b28-a1c8-0316eec8a4ed","pagecount":"14","content":"Food safety Vietnam• Food systems are rapidly changing in many developing countries including Vietnam, 4-5 % grow of livestock sector• These changes are associated with more consumption of risky animal food• Pork is most important meat diet for Vietnamese (similar in Laos, Thailand and Cambodia)• Most of this is produced, slaughter and sold in traditional markets• Food safety has become an increasing concern (consumers & policymakers)• Concerns include contamination with chemical and microbiological hazards• Little information on the actual risks or how to manage them.• Vietnam has a modern food safety law, but challenges exist:• Limited resources for surveillanceFood safety performance tool Aim & pillars: Safety, scalability and societal concerns Safety: Core of the tool using a risk-based approach to provide robust assessments of food safety outcomes food commodity (e.g. pork).Sustainability and scalability assessment of the value chain.• Business performance (e.g. market share, expected trends, potential for change) and supply chain governance (e.g. trust and interventions).• supplementary to pillar 1 and 2 such as gender and equity, cultural norms etc. which may synergize or trade-off with food safety.A value chain may provide safe food but have little potential for scaling (e.g. niche products)Aim: Allow rapid assessment of food safety outcomes in value chainsHow the tool was used• Qualitative (focus group discussions, FGD, key informant interviews, KII)• > 500 KII and 12 FGD• Content: Business scale & trends, trust, governance, KAP, intervention (perception)• Farm to fork• Quantitative (biological sampling and observational checklist) using a probabilistic sampling design to ensure representativeness.• >700 samples collected across different pork value chains  ","tokenCount":"257"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"9bc87fee2aaed229189db4283a2950eb","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/a7990432-0661-43ca-827c-f9b1a78ce3e3/retrieve","id":"-1926887087"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"f813d673-9e26-43b1-9080-9056b7faa5e6","pagecount":"55","content":"Dada la necesidad de docwnentar el impacto económico logrado con las inversiones efectuadas para diseñar y difundir nuevas tecnologías, que permitan modernizar el sector agropecuario colombiano en general y de la Amazonia & Orinoquia (A&O) en particular, en este estudio se efectúan estimaciones del impacto resultante de la adopción de nuevas técnicas de producción basadas en nuevo germoplasrna de arroz y de forrajes en A&O. Estas dos actividades de investigación del CIAT, en los últimos años, han contado con el valioso apoyo financiero del Convenio de Cooperación Técnica y Científica MADR-ClAT.El trabajo de evaluación del impacto, en el caso de los forrajes, se basa principalmente en información de estudios efectuados en el pasado por el CIAT. Esta información histórica permite elaborar proyecciones de la adopción, pero teniendo presente que el pasado no es totalmente extrapolable, ya que el entorno económico, social y político varía con el paso del tiempo.La adopción e impacto del uso de mejores forrajes se evalúa en dos áreas muy específicas:En el estudio se analizan las tendencias de la adopción de furrajes, según clase de pastos, en las dos zonas de referencia. Se concluye que las nuevas especies de brachiaria han tenido gran aceptación y que paulatinamente han ido sustituyendo a la tradicional B. decumbens, debido a la alta susceptibilidad de esta gramínea a la plaga del \"mión\" o \"salivazo\" .La diversificación del gerrnoplasma forrajero es otro aspecto sobresaliente de los procesos de adopción de pasturas en A&O, lo cual ayuda a reducir los riesgos biológicos por plagas y enfermedades.La adopción de pasturas en A&O aún no tiene la dimensión suficiente como para inducir bajas de los precios reales de los productos ganaderos en el ámbito nacional o local. Por esta razón, la evaluación de su impacto se circunscribe a cuantificar el valor de los cambios de la productividad logrados en el contexto de las fmcas ganaderas.La difusión y adopción de nuevas tecnologias arroceras ha sido de carácter masivo tanto nacional como regionalmente, lo cual ha determinado sustanciales crecimientos de la productividad, la producción, el consumo y drásticas reducciones de los precios reales pagados por los conswnidores, • • • Entre 1967 Y 1997 la producción de arroz en Colombia más que se duplicó, el precio real al productor se redujo en una tercera parte y el consumo per cápita se incrementó en un 64%.Los cambios técnicos evaluados representan el conjunto de nuevo germoplasrna, insumas y formas de producción, adoptados por los arroceros durante el período de referencia. Por todo lo anterior, para la evaluación del impacto de la adopción en forrajes y arroz se utilizaron enfoques metodológicos díferentes. En el primer caso se valoran las ganancias en productividad y se expresan corno valores presentes (VP) y anualidades (A). En el caso de arroz se aplica el modelo de excedentes económícos MODEXC, el cual permíte estimar los beneficios logrados por productores y consumídores en el proceso de adopción tecnológica, los cuales también se expresan corno valores presentes y anualidades.La evaluación incluye estírnaciones del ahorro de tierra resultante del uso de tecnologías más productivas. Parecería que ante la gran disponibilidad de tierra en A&O, estimar ahorros de este recurso no tiene mayor sentido. Sin embargo, es preciso considerar que una gran proporción de los suelos de A&O, presenta serios limitantes fisicos y químicos y que la región tiene grandes carencias en cuanto a infraestructura fisica y de comunicaciones.Por lo señalado anteriormente, se considera que una de las posibles rutas para el desarrollo de A&O seria la de intensificar la producción mediante el uso de mejores técnicas y concentrarla alrededor de núcleos o polos de desarrollo, para hacerla más competitiva y lograr un mejor aprovechamiento de la infraestructura fisica disponible.El valor presente de los incrementos en productividad por el empleo de pastos más productivos en Puerto López -Puerto Gaitán para el período 1978-2000 se estímó en us$ 44.5 míllones, equivalentes a una anualidad de us$ 5 millones.Empleando la misma metodologia en el piedemonte del Caquetá para el período 1986-2000, se estírna que el VP se sitúa alrededor us$ 23 mílIones, que anualizados equivalen a us$ 3 míllones.Se estimaron los beneficios tecnológicos asociados con las nuevas tecnologías de arroz, para Colombia como un todo, para A&O y para otras regiones productoras del país. El beneficio nacional total, incluyendo productores y consumidores, del período 1967-1997, se estimó en aproximadamente us$I.3 billones, que representan una anualidad de us$ 136 millones.Para dar una idea de la magnitud relativa de las cifras anteriores, se puede anotar que la producción arrocera nacional en 1997 valorada a precios recibidos por el productor se estimó en us$ 551 millones, y en us$ 1.4 billones a precios pagados por el consumídor. Lo anterior significa que la anualidad calculada representa una cuarta o una décírna parte del valor de la producción de 1997, según el tipo de precios que se utilice para valorarla.El beneficio estimado del cambio tecnológico en arroz en un período de treinta años, es muy similar a la suma que el gobierno colombiano espera recibir de Estados Unidos como apoyo al Plan Colombia.• Los beneficios tecnológicos atribuibles al cambio técnico en producción de arroz en A&O durante el mismo período, se calculan en us$ 359 millones, que como anualidad equivalen a us$ 38 millones. Este nivel de beneficios, que representa el 28% del total, es muy congruente con la participación de A&O en la producción nacional de arroz.Dada la poca apertura del mercado nacional de arroz en el período evaluado, la innovación técnica posibilito una fuerte baja de los precios reales, que concentró la mayor parte de los beneficios tecnológicos en los consumidores.Si se trata de comparar los beneficios técnicos generados por el cambio técnico en forrajes y en arroz es preciso tener de presente que: En las primeros se ha evaluado un periodo más corto, en áreas específicas de A&O. En el segundo, la evaluación representa tres décadas de cambio técnico, de gran intensidad y cobertura no solo en A&O sino en todo el país.El ahorro de tierra por el empleo de mejores tecnologías forrajeras señala que en Puerto López -Puerto Gaitán con la tecnología tradicional, para lograr los actuales niveles de producción, se hubiese requerido un área adicional de aproximadamente un cuarto de millón de hectáreas.Con los rendimientos de la tecnología tradicional, la producción actual de arroz en A&O se hubiera obtenido con una superficie arrocera que duplica a la que efectivamente se utilizó.El cambio técnico evaluado representa el esfuerzo de numerosas entidades públicas y privadas, nacionales e internacionales, que participaron en diferentes etapas del diseño y difusión de las nuevas técnicas.En todo este proceso el CIAT tubo una importante participación, que demuestra que la cooperación técnica y científica entre instituciones nacionales e internacionales, es una herramienta válida, dentro de una estrategia de desarrollo que busca la modernización de la agricultura colombiana, de forma eficiente competitiva y sostenible.Los resultados que arroja la evaluación efectuada llevan a reflexionar sobre el impacto del cambio técnico y su dimensión temporal. Para la evaluación del impacto técnico se requiere una visión de largo plazo, en un proceso donde a través de los años se van logrando resultados intermedios, que conducen a los impactos finales de largo plazo. Estos últimos están más intimamente ligados con las metas sociales de desarrollo como alivio de la pobreza, conservación delmedio ambiente y de los de recursos naturales y crecimiento de la economía Esto implica que se requiere un seguimiento sistematizado de los resultados intermedios que se van logrando en el tiempo, con el propósito de entender el proceso y aplicar los correctivos necesarios cuando se detecten fallas o cuellos de botella y asegurar que el trabajo de investigación y desarrollo efectuado, tendrá a largo plazo un claro impacto social.Palabras clave: Colombia, Amazonia & Orinoquia, Cambio técnico, Adopción, Impacto, Forrajes, Arroz. La región de la Amazonia & Orinoquia (A&O) de Colombia paulatinamente está incrementando su participación en la actividad productiva del país, es así como hoy en día aporta una fracción muy significativa a la oferta nacional de varios productos como arroz, palma africana, carne vacuna, soya, maíz y yuca.Se trata de una región que ocupa casi el 60% del territorio nacional-Figura 1y en donde el país cuenta con un enorme potencial de recursos de tierras, energéticos, hídricos y de biodiversidad, que constituyen un valioso patrimonio para el desarrollo económico de Colombia.La expansión de la actividad económica se ha dado principalmente en la Orinoquia en el área de piedemonte del departamento del Meta y en menor medida en la Amazonia, particularmente en el piedemonte del Caquetá.Gran parte del avance de la producción obedece a una mayor disponibilidad de tecnologías agropecuarias adaptadas a las condiciones ambientales y económicas de esta extensa región. Una amplia gama de entidades nacionales e internacionales de investigación y desarrollo han contribuido a incrementar las opciones productivas y las alternativas para el manejo de los recursos naturales de la Amazonia & Orinoquia colombianas.El CIAT desde mediados de la década del 70 ha venido trabajando en asocio principalmente con el Instituto Colombiano Agropecuario (ICA) hoy CORPOICA y con otras instituciones, en el diseño de nuevas tecnologías para la región de referencia. Los resultados de este esfuerzo, se han manifestado principalmente en mayor disponibilidad de germoplasrna adaptado de arroz, forrajes y de otros cultivos como sorgo, maíz, soya, gran parte del cual ya está en manos de los productores de la región como nuevos cultivares comerciales. (Véase entre otros a Leal, 1994 y Pardo et al, 1999)Desde la perspectiva de la planificación del uso del suelo y de los recursos productivos y de la priorización de las alternativas de producción a desarrollar en el futuro en A&O, es conveniente tener como referencia los procesos de cambio tecnológico observados en el pasado y conocer como han sido, que magnitud han tenido, y que impactos se han logrado en términos de producción y del manejo y uso de los suelos . La información disponible al respecto es muy precaria por varias razones: 1) Son procesos de adopción relativamente nuevos y 2) Dada la extensión del territorio es dificil y costoso, establecer sistemas de seguimiento permanente de los procesos de adopción tecnológica, que permitan posteriormente evaluar sus impactos socioeconómicos y ambientales y• extraer lecciones útiles para el diseño de políticas apropiadas que impulsen el desarrollo de A&O.En este estudio se trata de aprovechar de la mejor manera posible, la dilatada experiencia del CIAT en la región de referencia, que se refleja en numerosos trabajos técnicos y económicos, para efectuar una evaluación del impacto ex-post, resuhante de la adopción de nuevas tecnologías de forrajes y arroz en A&O.A pesar de las limitaciones de información para efectuar una exhaustiva evaluación del impacto económico y ambiental logrado, este trabajo es una primera aproximación para indicar la alta rentabilidad social de la inversión en ciencia y tecnología y el enorme potencial del desarrollo tecnológico en los Llanos y la Amazonia del país.No obstante que en la actualidad las áreas impactadas con nueva tecnología, son aún pequeñas si se las compara la enorme extensión de recursos de tierra susceptibles de incorporar a la actividad productiva y que además muchos de los procesos de adopción en la región aún se encuentran en etapas muy tempranas, consideramos que es importante avanzar en el sentido de mostrar además de los indicadores de adopción, algunas estimaciones que muestren los efectos de tal adopción, en especial los impactos sobre la productividad y en el ahorro de recursos de tierra debidos a incrementos de la producción por hectárea.Diversos estudios de diagnóstico han revelado que en A&O la principallirnitación para el avance de la producción y la productividad de la ganadería vacuna es la precaria base forrajera constituida principalmente por especies nativas bien adaptadas pero muy pobres, en cuanto a cantidad y calidad forrajera, de los géneros Trachipogon, Axonopus, Paspalum y Andropogon (Pardo, et al., 1999) Y por especies introducidas, principalmente Melinis minutiflora (Chopin) e Hyparrhenia rufa (puntero) en avanzado estado de degradación.La investigación en forrajes se ha enfucado principalmente hacia el desarrollo de nuevo germoplasma de graIIÚneas y de leguminosas, adaptado a las condiciones de baja fertilidad, elevada acidez y tolerantes a los altos niveles de saturación de aluminio, prevalecientes en ésta región del país.La innovación tecnológica en forrajes ha ido mucho más allá de la generación de nuevo germoplasma, también incluye el manejo agronómico del mismo, prácticas y recomendaciones para su establecimiento, mantenimiento, renovación de praderas y el control de plagas y enfermedades .Desde finales de la década del 70 el CIAT ha monitoreado el desempeño de los sistemas de producción de la región de interés. El Proyecto ETES (Evaluación Técnico -Económica de los Sistemas de Producción Pecuaria Extensiva) fue el punto de partida de una serie de trabajos, orientados a evaluar la dinámica de la producción ganadera y el comportamiento a nivel de finca de las nuevas alternativas forrajeras para los Llanos y la Amazonia colombiana. A partir de la segunda mitad de los 70, se efectuaron numerosos estudios principalmente orientados al análisis de la evo lución de los sistemas ganaderos y a la evaluación de la rentabilidad y viabilidad técnica y económica de las nuevas alternativas 6• productivas. (entre estos trabajos están: Vera y Seré, 1985;Gutiérrez, 1979;Charry, 1980;Rivas et al, 1989;Cadavid et al, 1990, Cadavid 1995, Rivas 1999).Figura l. Extensión y Localización de la Amazonia y Orinoquia de Colombia a.p:.a. Brachiaria decumbens ha sido la gramínea introducida de mayor éxito y cobertura, no solo en Colombia, sino en el trópico latinoamericano en general. Pero no obstante su gran calidad forrajera, este material ha sido persistentemente atacado por una plaga denominada Mión o salivazo (Zulia colombiana, Aeneolamia varia), que deteriora considerablemente su productividad y en casos extremos inutiliza los potreros .Para responder a este problema, la investigación con el genero brachiaria ha tenido gran prioridad y apunta hacia el desarrollo de nuevos materiales resistentes o tolerantes al mÍón y con mayor productividad, en términos de carga y producción de carne y de leche, que la Brachiaria decumbens tradicional.La investigación con Brachiarias posibilhó el1anzamiento en 1987 de dos nuevos materiales: Brachiaria dictyoneura cv. Llanero y Brachiaria brizantha cv. La Libertad,• ambos tolerantes al mión y con rápida recuperación posterior al ataque (Pardo, et al, 1999). En ese mismo año se liberó la leguminosa Centrosema acutifolium cv. VichadaEn 1992 se colocaron a disposición de los productores nuevos materiales forrajeros, la gramínea Brachiaria humidicola cv. Pasto humidicola y la leguminosa Arachis pin/oi 17434 ev. Maní forrajero perenne. Esta última es una leguminosa de múltiple propósito utilizable como banco de proteína, en pastoreo en asociaciones con las gramineas y como cobertura en cultivos de plantación. (Rincón et al, 1992) La investigación de nuevas alternativas forrajeras para A&O continúa avanzando y en los últimos años ha contado con el valioso apoyo financiero del Convenio de cooperación técnica y científica MADR -CIAT, dentro de una estrategia que busca desarrollar elementos y componentes tecnológicos para establecer sistemas de producción agropecuarios sostenibles, productivos y competitivos en los Llanos Orientales y la región Amazónica. Cifras recientes del cense arrocero de 1999 muestran que el área cultivada en los Llanos durante ese año fue de 167mil hectáreas de las cuales casi el 40% (66 mil ha) estaban bajo el sisteJIlll de riego, aproximadamente el 60% (101 mil ha) se cultivaban con el sistema de secano mecanizado y una fracción insignificante, inferior all % del área total (12 ha),se encontraba cultivada con el método de secano tradicional (Fedearroz, 2000).Los datos censales señalan que en esa región no se detectan diferencias sustanciales en los rendimientos, ni por tamaño de unidad productora de arroz (UF A) ni por tipo de tenencia de la tierra. Las diferencias en rendimientos aparecen más claramente cuando los datos se agrupan por sistema de producción.En A&O se aprecia que las unidades productoras de arroz mas frecuentes son las que se ubican en el estrato O-50 ha, en donde aparece el 76% de las mismas. Estas explotaciones controlan el 29% del área cultivada y presentan un rendimiento de 4.5 tmlha de arroz paddy seco. Tales rendimientos no difieren sustancialmente de los observados en los otros estratos (Cuadro 1),• La mayor proporción de área cultivada se concentra en el estrato de 101-500 has, en el cual se ubíca el 10% de las unídades productoras y e145% de la superficie cultivada.Los rendímientos según el tipo de tenencía tampoco varían signíficativamente: 4.6 tm!ha tanto en el grupo de propietarios como en el de arrendatarios y 4.5 !In/ha en el grupo de otras clases de tenencia (Fedearroz, 2000).Unidades productoras, área y rendimientos de arroz por estrato de tamaño A&O, 1999.  Fedearroz (2000).Si se considera que el diferencial de rendimientos entre los distintos sistemas de producción obedece a diferencias en los patrones tecnológicos, se concluye que entre los sistemas mecanizados de A&O, riego y secano, no se presentan grandes brechas tecnológicas, ya que sus niveles de rendimientos son muy símilares. (Figura 5)La gran brecha tecnológica aparece cuando se establecen comparaciones entre los sistemas mecanizados y el secano manual. Este último no solo presenta níveles de rendirníento por hectárea sustancialmente más bajos, sino que sus áreas cultivadas muestran una acentuada tendencia declinante (Figuras 3, 4 y 5). En trabajo de CIAr, en asocio con CORPOICA y otras instituciones nacionales en el tema de forrajes, se ha concentrado en el diseño de nuevos materiales forrajeros y su utilización en A&O, con el propósito de suplir las demandas de los productores ganaderos de ésta región, quienes requieren nuevos forrajes con características especificas: 1) Buena calidad nutritiva 2) Alta persistencia y 3) Adaptables a los diferentes nichos locales en suelos de sabana y márgenes de bosque.tecnológica Dicho valor está en función de las distancias a los mercados, la oferta tecnológica, la disponibilidad y calidad de la infraestructura vial y las expectativas con respecto al desarrollo futuro de la región. (Smith et al., 1994).Para comprender en mayor profundidad los procesos de cambio técnico basados en nuevos furrajes en la región bajo estudio, es importante considerar que los nuevos materiales furrajeros son introducidos a las explotaciones ganaderas, para utilizarlos estratégicamente en las actividades más productivas: ceba de animales y producción de leche.Lo anterior determina la actual estructura del área en pastos: Una pequeñas fracción de pastos mejorados para ser utilizados estratégicameute y una mayoritaria fracción en pasturas nativas. La lógica económica detrás de este comportamieuto es que en la medida en que la tierra sea un factor relativamente abundante y barato, resulta arractivo para los productores incrementar su disponibilidad furrajera incorporando nuevas áreas. Esta situación se observa c1aramente en las áreas más marginales, en tanto que en las zonas donde el precio de la tierras es más alto, la proporción del área en pastos mejorados tiende también a ser más alta La intensificación de la producción ganadera en A&O, mediante el empleo de pasturas altamente productivas, ha ocurrido en las zonas más próximas a los núcleos urbanos, en áreas donde se amplía o mejora la red vial o cuando se forma o expande un mercado, como en el caso de la leche en el Caquetá. (Michelsen H., 1990) Reiterando, en las zonas más marginales, donde la tierra es relativamente abundante y sus precios más bajos, la expansión productiva se produce via utilización de mayor área ganadera, sin intensificar la ya existente. Esto lleva a la conformación de sistemas muy extensivos, cuya base forrajera es la sabana nativa, de muy baja productividad por animal o por unidad de área.La figura 7 ilustra en términos generales las variaciones esperadas en la productividad ganadera al cambiar la fuente de forraje, pasando desde la sabana nativa hasta una pradera mixta de gramíneas y leguminosas de alta productividad. En ella se puede observar claramente el enorme potencial existente para incrementar la productividad ganadera, mediante la utilización de las nuevas alternativas forrajeras.Figura 6 Ubicación de las fincas encuestadas en 1992 y Sistemas de Tierra. Altillanura Oriental de Colombia: Area de Puerto López -Puerto Gaitán Fuente: Cadavid J.V.(I995) VNJT APo 1'\" calidad forrajera, los continuos ataques de las honnigas, arriera (Atta leavigata) y torre de paja (Acromyrmex landoltl), han diezmado considerablemente los pastizales de A. gayanus en la Altillanura Oriental de Colombia (Cadavid, 1995).La leguminosa de mayor éxito como componente de las pasturas asociadas es S. capítata, la cual está presente en todas las asociaciones de importancia económica en la AltillanuraOriental. La asociación mas frecuente es B. decumbens en mezcla con S. cap ita, que ocupa casi la mitad del área total sembrada con pasturas mixtas. Siguen en importancia las mezclas de y S. capitata con B. humidícola y con B. dictyoneura.La asociación de A. gayanus con C. acutifo/ium fue poco exitosa, sus áreas sembradas fueron reducidas y desapareció muy rápidamente de la región bajo análisis.La leguminosa forrajera A. pintoi liberada en 1992 con el nombre comercial de maní forrajero perelllle, en la actualidad presenta muy baja tasa de difusión en los Llanos. Una encuesta telefónica elaborada en 1995 para documentar la adopción temprana de ésta leguminosa en el país, reveló que su adopción se encontraba en una fase muy incipiente y que las experiencias de los productores se concentraban en pequeños áreas, de 2.6 has en promedio por finca (Rivas, 1997).En la Altillanura, el principallimitante para la expansión de las siembras de esa leguminosa, es la baja adaptación del ecotipo disponible, CIAT 17434, poco apropiado para la baja fertilidad de los suelos y las severas condiciones de sequia prolongada, típicos de ésta zona. La investigación con este material avanza hacia el desarrollo de acepciones más tolerantes a la sequía y con mayor adaptación a suelos de baja fertilidad, 10 cual facilitará su avance en esta región de Colombia.Es pertinente reiterar que una fuceta sobresaliente del proceso de adopción de pasturas en los Llanos Orientales en el período analizado, es la rápida aceptación y adopción de los nuevos cultivares de brachíaria de reciente aparición, en particular hurnidico la y dictyoneura. Esto refleja la gran demanda que existe en la región por nuevos materiales forrajeros de alta productividad y con mayor resistencia al salivazo...  IV. B Caquetá.El Caquetli es \\lll extenso territorio (8.9 millones de hectáreas), localizado al sur de Colombia, con una alta proporción de su área ocupada por el bosque húmedo tropical 20 (74%). El piedemonte caqueteño ocupa una superficie de 1.8 millones de hectáreas, de las cuales el 78% está cubierta con pastos. (Ramírez & Seré, 1990). (Ver Figura 12)El piedemonte del Caquetá es una zona altamente representativa de la Amazonia colombiana. En la actualidad predominan en ella los sistemas de ganaderos de doble propósito con énfasis en la producción de leche. Desde 1987 el CIAT con la colaboración de Nestlé de Colombia y otras instituciones, que en distintos momentos han colaborado, ha seguido la evolución de la ganadería de ésta región del país Diferentes estudios efectuados han permitido identificar varias fases en la evolución y desempeño de la ganadería, en donde el común denominador ha sido la progresiva intensificación de la producción a través del empleo de nuevos materíales forrajeros, lo cual a su vez a inducido cambios en los sistemas de producción y en la productividad de la ganadería. (Michelsen, 1990, Ramírez & Seré, 1990, Rivas y Holmann, 1999) Los sistemas pecuarios del Caquetá han evolucionado desde fases muy extensivas, en donde la base forrajera estaba fundamentalmente conformada por pasturas nativas de baja calidad, utilizadas para actividades de cría de vacunos y producción muy marginal de leche para su posterior transformación en queso, hasta sistemas más intensivos en cuya base forrajera juegan un rol muy importante los pastos mejorados y en donde la producción de leche representa una fracción muy significativa del ingreso total de las fincas.La utilización de pastos mejorados en la región ha tenido un impacto importante sobre la oríentación económica de los sistemas ganaderos, sobre la distribución espacial de la producción y sobre el uso de la tierra. Los sistemas ganaderos, en particular los ubicados en el piedemonte, paulatinamente pasaron de la cría sin ordeño o con ordeño muy limitado, al doble propósito con énfasis en producción de leche (Michelsen, 1990).Dada la extensión del territorio y los altos costos de transporte, la producción lechera ha tendido a concentrarse alrededor de las vías más importantes y cerca a los centros de acopio.Una encuesta realizada por el CIAT y NESTLE en 1986 indicó que de un total de 381 mil hectáreas de pastos localizadas en las fincas proveedoras de Nestlé, más de la mitad (64.5%) correspondía a praderas nativas conocidas con el nombre local de \"criaderos\".Según Ramírez & Seré (1990) estos están conformados principalmente por espec.ies como Paspalum spp, Axonopus spp, Homolepis aturensis en mezclas con Hyparrhenia rufa altamente degradada. En ese año los pastos mejorados ocupaban una superficie ligeramente superior a la tercera parte del área total de pastos de las fincas (35.5%).Dentro de la superficie cubierta con pastos mejorados era marcado el predominio de B. decumbens, que ocupaba más de tres cuartas partes de ella. La participación de otras especies era relativamente baja.La encuesta de 1997 mostró un cambio sustancial en la estructura de la superficie de pastos. Se observó que el tamaño promedio de las explotaciones ganaderas varió relativamente poco -130 has en 1986, 158 has en 1997-pero hubo un importante proceso de sustitución de pasturas nativas por pastos mejorados.El principal componente de la base forrajera de la región, las pasturas nativas o criaderos, con el transcurso del tiempo perdió importancia en los sistemas de alimentación de la ganadería. En el primer año citado constituian casi dos terceras partes (65%), esa proporción había caído dramáticamente a solo 30%. en 1997 (Cuadro 4).Se aprecia una creciente importancia de nuevos materiales de Brachiaria tales como humidicola, brizantha y dictyoneura (Cuadro 4). Por otra parte, la tradicional B. decumbens, el pasto mejorado predominante, pierde terreno frente a otros pagros. En efecto entre 1986 y 1997 la participación de ese material en el área total de pastizales mejorados declinó de 76 a 65%.La leguminosa forrajera Arachis pintoi, cv maní forrajero perenne, de reciente aparición en el Caquetá, aún se encuentra en una fase muy temprana de su adopción. En 1997 en el Caquetá solo 16 (9%) entre 174 productores seleccionados al azar, estaban ensayando con este material en el momento de la entrevista. Las áreas sembradas aún son muy reducidas y los productores se encuentran en una etapa de prueba y error para ajustar el material a sus recursos y necesidades, observar su comportamiento y tomar decisiones con respecto a su adopción definitiva (Rivas y Ho1mann.1999).En el momento de la encuesta se encontró que el material disponible en la región, CIAT 17434, no es apropiado para los suelos de mesón, que se caracterizan por su baja fertilidad, se clasifican como oxisoles y constituyen una elevada proporción de los suelos del Caquetá. Según el estudio de Ramírez y Seré (1990), la superficie de mesones corresponde a casi el 90% del área de las fincas estudiadas.Las delicadas situaciones de orden social y político que hoy día se viven en el país y en esa región en particular, no permiten albergar mucho optimismo con respecto a rápidos procesos de adopción de pasturas, por lo menos en el futuro cercano. Se conoce ampliamente que las inversiones en el desarrollo de nuevos pastizales en las explotaciones ganaderas es una decisión que implica destinar importantes recursos de capital durante un considerable período de tiempo, lo cual puede ser dificil y riesgoso para productores pequeños y medianos como lo son los del Caquetá.Si a los riesgos biológicos y económicos propios de la actividad ganadera, se le adicionan los que se derivan de una compleja situación de orden social y político, resulta poco probable que los productores de la región emprendan, en éstas circunstancias, un proceso sostenido de inversiones en el desarrollo de nuevas pasturas.Consecuente con el planteamiento anterior, para estimar la superficie de pastos en el año 2000 en el Caquetá, se asumió que el área en pasturas en el período 1997-2000 creció a una tasa promedia anual de 1 %, muy modesta e inferior a las tasas históricas observadas en el período 1986-1997 (Cuadro 4).La figura 13 muestra la estimaciones sobre la evo lución en el tiempo de las superficies plantadas con brachiarias en el Caquetá durante el periodo 1986-2000.A pesar del significativo avance de las nuevas especies de brachiaria en el Caquetá (humidicola, brizantha y dictyoneura), se nota todavia un predominio de la tradicional B.   decumbens, lo cual implica una gran vulnerabilidad de la base forrajera debido a la alta susceptibilidad de esta gramínea al salivazo, plaga que por condiciones climáticas encuentra en el Caquetá circunstancias muy favorables para su desarrollo. En el Caquetá no existe tradición de uso de pasturas mixtas de grarnineas y leguminosas.El conocimiento de ésta tecnología recién se está introduciendo, por lo cual a nivel de campo son muy pocas las experiencias que se pueden observar sobre la utilización a nivel de finca de esta clase de praderas. Los niveles de productividad utilizados para estimar los valores de la producción adicional resultantes del empleo de las brachiarias de reciente introducción en el Caquetá se muestran en la Figura 14. Se pueden considerar como los mejores estimativos disponibles, los cuales se basan en observaciones y opiniones de expertos que trabajan en la zona. En la actualidad no existen cuantificaciones formales de los niveles de productividad de los diferentes tipos de bracmaria, en términos de producción de carne y leche, para los sistemas ganaderos de doble propósito del Caquetá. El sector arrocero de Colombia se caracteriza por su amplio dinamismo en cuanto a generación y adopción de nuevas tecnologías. En este cuhivo el cambio técnico incluye no solo el empleo de insumos modernos, sino también el uso de nuevos y mejores equipos y practicas de preparación, siembra y manejo del cultivo. En el Cuadro 5 se muestran las variedades de arroz liberadas en Colombia en el transcurso de tres décadas.Hasta 1967 la variedad blue bonnet 50 dominaba el mercado nacional y ocupaba el 80% de la superficie plantada. Con la aparición de las variedades enanas comenzó a perder aceleradamente participación en el mercado. Es así como en 1974 ocupaba tan solo ell% del área cultivada y había sido remplazada por IR22 (33% del total), IR8 (31%) Y CICA4 (27%).La introducción en 1967 de IR8, la primera variedad enana, fue un hecho trascendental para el despegue tecnológico del cultivo en el país. A partir de ese momento se inició un proceso de liberación de nuevas variedades, cuya adopción elevó considerablemente los rendimientos. Por ejemplo, en 1966 en el departamento del Meta la producción promedia pór hectárea era de 1.9 tm, diez años después en 1976, ese rendimiento se situaba en 4.2 tm, lo cual implica una tasa de crecimiento de 8.2% en promedio por año. Veinte años después de la liberación de IR8, los rendimientos promedios se aproximaban a 4.5tm/ha (Figura 16). Hacia 1978 la variedad IR8 prácticameme había desaparecido, solo cubria el 1.3% de la superficie cultivada. IR22 también estaba siendo sustituido por otras variedades y su participación en las áreas sembradas había caído a 19.8%.Comenzaba el predominio de los CICA's, los que en conjumo, en ese año, comabilizaron cerca de tres cuartas partes del área cultivada de arroz en Colombia, así: CICA4 (26.8%), CICA9 (25.8%), CICA7(16.1%) y CICA6 (5.6%). - (Montes et al, 1980).Información reciente de Fedearroz sobre el uso de variedades en el período 1991-1997, muestra que en ese período predominaron en los Llanos Oriemales de Colombia: CICA 8, Oryzica 1 y Oryzica Llanos 5, las cuales en promedio contabilizaron casi el 70% de la superficie cultivada. Siguieron en importancia Línea 2, Selecta 3-20 y Caribe 8 (Cuadro 6). La variedad regional mas difundida es Oryzica Llanos 5 de la cual se sembraron anualmente en promedio cerca de 17 mil hectáreas, que constituyen el 13% de la superficie arrocera total. Variedades regionales como Metica 1, hasta el momemo han logrado poco éxito en A&O (Cuadro 6).Los procesos de adopción de nuevas tecnologías arroceras en A&O han sido similares a los observados en otras regiones del país. Se pueden distinguir dos fuses. Durante la primera el impacto tecnológico determinó un rápido crecimiento de los rendimientos y en menor medida de las áreas cultivadas. En la segunda, cuando se alcanzó un techo tecnológico, el desarrollo de las nuevas técnicas enfatizó en conservar los altos rendimientos logrados y en incorporar a las variedades mejoradas, mayor resistencias a las plagas y enfermedades más comunes de la región, príncipaImente Pyricularia (Pyricularia grisae), Hoja blanca (VHB), Sogata (Tagosodes Orizicolus) y en menor grado el \"entorchamiento\" (virus de necrosis rayada del arroz).En esta segunda etapa el desarrollo tecnológico no solo ha buscado mantener los rendimientos del cultivo a alto nivel, síno que también pretende una mayor racionalización del uso de los recursos como agua, fertilizantes, plaguicidas y maquinaria, con el propósito de hacer más competitiva la índustria, facilitar su mserción en un mercado global altamente competitivo y reducir los impactos negativos del exagerado empleo de agroquúnicos sobre el medio ambíente.Reiterando, las dos fases del desarrollo tecnológico en arroz en los Llanos Orientales se pueden apreciar muy claramente en la Figura 16. La producción por hectárea creció rápidamente desde mediados de la década del 50 hasta alcanzar niveles por encima de las 4 tm/ha. Una vez que se superó la barrera de las 4 un/ha, en la segunda mitad de los 70, los incrementos han sido marginales y su tendencia es a la estabilidad.  ',',1,',',',',',',1,',',','  ',',',',1,1,',',',',1,',', Uno de los principales beneficios directos del uso de nuevas tecnologías de producción lo constituyen los incrementos de la productividad, los cuales se materializan en mayores niveles de producción por unidad de tierra o de ganado y en menores costos por unidad de producto.La evaluación económica de los beneficios tecnológicos involucra tanto los logrados por los productores que adoptan las nuevas técnicas, como los obtenidos por los consumidores quienes se benefician por la reducción de los precios reales en el mercado y por una mayor disponibilidad de producto.En el caso de las tecnologías furrajeras en A& O de Colombia, los beneficios tecnológicos más evidentes son los logrados a través de las alzas en productividad, en el ámbito de las fincas adoptadoras. La magnitud del cambio técnico de la ganadería en A&O, aún no presenta la dimensión suficiente como para inducir reducciones significativas en los precios reales al consumidor en el contexto regional o de país. En la Figura 17 se presenta la evolución de los precios reales de carne vacuna en Bogotá, el principal centro consumidor del país. Se puede notar que en el período 1970-1998, ellos muestran una moderada tendencia creciente, 1.5% por año. Debido a lo anteríor, este trabajo se limita a efectuar estitnaciones del valor de las ganancias en productividad asociadas con el uso de pasturas mejoradas en la región bajo estudio, sin considerar posibles beneficios a los consumidores, inducidos por reducciones de los precios.Las variaciones de la productividad en los sistemas ganaderos extensivos son dificiles de cuantificar, ya que ello que implica mediciones en el campo de la producción fisica de carne y de leche en intervalos predeterminados de tiempo, con un número adecuado de observaciones que permitan hacer inferencia a nivel finca, sistema o región productora, lo cual resulta costoso en términos de tiempo y de recursos. Si lo a lo anterior se adiciona la complejidad y heterogeneidad de los diferentes sistemas de producción ganadera, es muy fácilmente entendible la poca disponibilidad de información estadística confiable sobre los niveles y variaciones de la productividad ganadera en una región o país determinado.En este estudio los niveles de productividad se basan en la información proveniente de fuentes experírnentales, ensayos en finca y opiniones de técnicos y expertos que trabajan en la región de referencia. Para evaluar los cambios en productividad se asume que el proceso de adopción consiste en el cambio de una pradera tradicional de decumbens en estado intermedio de degradación por una pastura de pasto mejorado bien sea A. gayanus, B. humidicola, B. brizantha o un asociación de gramineas con leguminosas. El valor del cambio en productividad, medido como el valor de la producción adicional, resultante de la adopción de nueva pasturas se estima como: Donde VP At = Valor de la producción adicional en el período t A.,,= Area plantada con el pasto a en el período t.PR.,,= Productividad fisica del pasto a en el período t -Tecnología mejorada PRt.!,b= Productividad fisica de decumbens degradada en el período base -Tecnología tradicional P,= Precio del producto en el período t.Las ganancias en productividad resultantes de la adopción de nuevas pasturas, representan un flujo de beneficios económicos a lo largo del período de vida útil de las praderas. En este caso, se asume una vida útil de 10 años, por lo cual en promedio cada año desaparece una décima parte del área plantada.En la evaluación para los Llanos Orientales se consideran dos periodos: a) 1978-1992 que incluye las estimaciones de la evolución del área en pasturas, basadas en los muestreos elaborados en la región de Puerto López -Puerto Gaitán y b) 1993-2000, que adiciona al período anterior, las estimaciones de las áreas plantadas basadas en los modelos de regresión ajustados sobre los datos muestrales.El período 1978-1992 puede considerarse como una fase de expansión económica en los Llanos colombianos, en la cual la participación del PIB regional en la economia nacional se incrementó, las áreas sembradas de muchos cultivos crecieron considerablementearroz, maíz, yuca, palma -y la explotación petrolera creció significativamente. (Rivas L., 1999) En este contexto económico es de esperar que las áreas sembradas con nuevas pasturas hayan crecido sustancialmente, tal como lo revelan las cifras obtenidas en los muestreos realizados. (Véase Figura 10)Sin embargo el crecimiento económico comenzó a declinar hacia mediados de los 90 cuando el ritmo de expansión de la economia nacional se debilitó, hasta llegar a cifras de crecimiento negativas a fines de la década pasada. En éstas nuevas circunstancias es realista considerar que el ritmo de expansión de las siembras de pastos haya decaído considerablemente.Por esta razón, aunque la tendencia del período 1978-1992 índique que las áreas en pastos contínuarán creciendo rápidamente, como en el caso de las praderas asociadas de gramineas y leguminosas en las cuales el modelo logístico presenta aho grado de ajuste y predice una rápida expansión de sus áreas, las condiciones económicas generales dan pautas de que tal expansión no ha ocurrido. Por lo anterior y para hacer mas conservadoras las estimaciones del área sembrada en asociaciones en el período 1993-2000, se empleó para su estimación la tendencia lineal del periodo 1987-1992, que es una etapa de más lento crecimiento. (Cuadro 3).El flujo de beneficios a lo largo del período de evaluación se expresa como un valor presente (VP). En el Cuadro 7 se presentan los flujos monetarios, los VP y las anualidades (A) de la producción adicional, derivada del empleo de las diferentes alternativas forrajeras en el área de Puerto López -Puerto Gaitán.Considerando solamente el primer período (1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992), se estima que el VP de la producción adicional de carne debido al empleo de pastos mejorados en la región citada es de aproximadamente us$ 16 millones distribuidos así: B. humidicola 45%, asociaciones de gramineas y leguminosas 41 %, A. gayanus 11 % y B. dictyoneura 3%.Ampliando el periodo considerado anteriormente hasta el año 2000 , el VP del flujo de beneficios estaría muy cercano a los us$ 45 millones. En términos de anualidades esto representa un flujo anual de us$ 5 millones. (Cuadro 7)Si el supuesto utilizado en la estimación anterior, de que los pastos mejorados reemplazan a una brachiaria tradicional degradada, se cambia por la suposición de que los pastos mejorados sustituyeron a la sabana nativa de muy baja productividad, el VP para el período 1978-2000 se aproxima a us$ 76 millones, lo cual implica una anualidad de us$ 8.5 millones.La priméra estimación, correspondiente al período 1978-1992, podria considerarse como el limite inferior de los beneficios estimados y la segunda, la del período 1978-200, como un límite superior. Este supuesto conservador intenta reflejar el hecho de que las condiciones económicas y de orden público de Colombia, en los tres últimos años de la década pasada, se deterioraron considerablemente y que esto afectó negativamente la dinámica de las siembras y los procesos de adopción de pasturas mejoradas en el Caquetá.Para el periodo intermuestral (I 986-1997), el VP de las ganancias en producción, por el empleo de las nuevas brachiarias en ese departamento, se estimó en us$ 13.9 millones, equivalentes a una anualidad de aproximadamente us$ 2millones (Cuadro 8).Al igual que en los Llanos Orientales, el grueso de los beneficios de la adopción de nuevas brachiarias se concentra en humidico la (68%), la grarninea que presenta la mayor dinámica de crecimiento en el Caquetá.Expandiendo el período anterior hasta el año 2000 (I986-2000), el VP de los beneficios por el aumento de la producción se calculan en us$ 23 millones, equivalentes a una anualidad de us$ 3 millones. Dado que los sistemas de producción de ésta región son duales o de doble propósito, con marcado énfasis en la producción de leche, la mayor pare de los beneficios se concentran en esa actividad. Cerca del 80% de los ellos se originan en la lechería (Cuadro 8).Las figuras 18 Y 19 muestran el flujo de beneficios tecnológicos resultantes de los cambios de productividad en el Caquetá, por el empleo de nuevas brachiarias, discriminando por actividad productiva y por tipo de material forrajero utilizado.Las cifras del valor de los aumentos de producción para los Llanos y el Caquetá considerados en conjunto, se presentan en el Cuadro 9.Cuadro 9Valor presente y anualidades de la producción adicional por el uso de mejores forrajes en A&O 1/ capturan los productores que adoptan éstas tecnologías, pero no se consideran los beneficios que pueden obtener los consumidores cuando el proceso de cambio técnico sea de mayor magnitud.Cuando se hace referencia a una región tan extensa como A&O de Colombia, en donde existe una enorme disponibilidad de recursos de tierra aún no incorporados a la producción, parece como algo fuera de contexto el considerar y evaluar los ahorros de tierra que se originan en la adopción de nuevas tecnologías.No obstante, es necesario tener presente que se trata de recursos de tierra frágiles con severas limitaciones químicas y fisicas, que requieren de la aplicación de técnicas de producción adecuadas, que permitan el desarrollo de sistemas de producción sostenibles, viables y rentables.Adicionalmente se debe tener en cuenta que se trata de un área con serias limitaciones en cuanto a disponibilidad de infraestructura víal y de almacenamiento, por lo cual la dispersión geográfica de la producción es un factor que incrementa sustancialmente los costos de producción de las áreas más marginales, afectando negativamente su competitividad.La tendencia observada en los sistemas ganaderos de A&O es hacia la intensificación, disminuyendo el tamaño promedio de los predios e incrementando la producción por hectárea y por unidad animal (CIAT 1987).Dadas las limitadas posibilidades del país, por lo menos en el corto y mediano plazo, para efectuar cuantiosas inversiones en desarrollo de infraestructura en A&O, el patrón de desarrollo de ésta región parece ir en dirección de la concentración e intensificación de la producción.Para que los sistemas productivos regionales sean competitivos deben intensificarse a través del cambio tecnológico y concentrarse alrededor de núcleos o polos de desarrollo, lo cual permitirá obtener econornias de escala y un aprovechamiento al máximo de la infraestructura fisica y social disponible.La intensificación hace mas competitivos los sistemas productivos al mismo tiempo que tiene un impacto significativo sobre el uso del suelo, frenando la presión para incorporar a la producción las áreas más frágiles desde el punto de vista ambiental y más marginales por su ubicación y situación económica.En este estudio los estimativos de ahorro de tierra originados en la intensificación de la producción se calculan como: donde;8A. = P,vr, _ P vr , R R 7T r .NT;8A. = Ahorro de tierra debido al uso de nuevas tecnologías en el año t P,vr 1 = Producción total con nuevas tecnologías en el año tRm: = Rendimiento físico por unidad de área obtenido con las nuevas tecnologias en el , añot RJT = Rendimiento físico por unidad de área obtenido con las tecnologías tradicionales • en el año base de evaluación El proceso de adopción de tecnologías forrajeras más productivas que las tradicionales, tanto en los Llanos como en el Caquetá, ha determinado que la producción ganadera se expanda sin incrementos sustanciales en la superficie ganadera utilizada. mejorada es muy grande (Figura 6). A pesar de que se tienen algunas evidencias de que las siembras de pastos mejoradas sustituyen a la sabana nativa (Cadavid, 1995), en este trabajo se hace un estimativo conservador del ahorro de tierra asumiendo que los pastos mejorados sustituyen a una pastura de brachiaria tradicional en Wl estado intennedio de su vida productiva.El ahorro de tierra originado en el empleo de nuevos materiales forrajeros se estima que en año 2000 se aproxima a un cuarto de millón de hectáreas en el área de Puerto López-Puerto Gaitán (Cuadro 10)El tema de ahorro de tierra es más relevante y crítico para la región del Caquetá que para los Llanos Orientales, dado que en ésta parte del país predominan las explotaciones pequeñas y medianas, las áreas de cultivo son poco significativas y la expansión de los pastizales se hace a partir de la tumba y quema del bosque natural, lo cual resulta en una mayor presión sobre este frágil ecosistema En consecuencia, en ésta zona del pais la intensificación de la producción en las áreas actualmente en producción, tiene una gran relevancia por su impacto en términos de reducción de las tasas de deforestación.En el Caquetá las estimaciones del ahorro de tierra debido al empleo de nuevas Brachiarias se estimó en el año 2000 en 30 mil hectáreas, bajo el supuesto ya señalado de que se cambiaron potreros de brachiaria tradicional en la mitad de su vida productiva por pasturas mejoradas (Figura 18).La magnitud de las cifras anteriores es importante si se considera que el tamaño promedio de las explotaciones ganaderas en el área estudiada del Caquetá no supera las 160 hectáreas. La encuesta de 1997 reveló que el incremento del uso de pastos mejorados en esa región de Colombia, ha derivado en una reducción de las áreas en descanso y un ligero incremento en términos absolutos y relativas de las zonas de reserva forestal en las fmcas ganaderas (Rivas y Ho1mann, 1999). La adopción de nuevas tecnologías de producción de arroz ha sido de carácter masivo tanto en los Llanos Orientales como en el resto de Colombia. Se puede decir que los productores de riego y secano mecanizado en su totalidad están utilizando exitosamente las nuevas variedades generadas por los sistemas nacional e internacional de investigación.El método de secano manual se ha rezagado, ante la carencia de tecnologías específicas los productores que emplean ese sistema han perdido competitividad y sus áreas sembradas se han reducido notoriamente. En 1961 el secano manual predominaba, ocupando el 56% del área cultivada. Progresivamente ha perdido importancia y en 1997 aparecía solo en el 7% de la superficie arrocera del país (Fedearroz, 1998).La adopción tecnológica ha derivado en reducciones del precio al consumidor e incrementos del consumo nacional por habitante. Entre 1967 y 1997 el precio real al consumidor declinó casi en una tercera parte (Figura 21). En ese mismo período el consumo por habitante subió 64% al pasar de 20.7 a 33.9 kg/año. (FAO, 1999) La dinámica del cambio técnico en la producción de arroz en Colombia y en A&O, ha sido de tal magnitud que sus efectos no solo se han traducido en importantes ganancias de productividad, sino que los precios al consumidor se han reducido sustancialmente, por lo cual estos últimos han capturado una fracción muy grande de los beneficios totales del cambio técnico.Por lo anterior, para estimar los beneficios atribuibles a la adopción de nuevas tecnologías en la producción de arroz, se aplicó un modelo de excedentes económicos, que permite calcular tanto los beneficios que capturan los consumidores, debido a la reducción de los precios reales, así como los beneficios netos obtenidos por los productores resultantes de las ganancias en productividad.El modelo empleado es MODEXC -Modelo de Excedentes Económicosdiseñado en el CIAT y utilizado en diversas evaluaciones del impacto de nuevas tecnologías agropecuarias.La conceptualización teórica de este modelo corresponde a la teoria Marshalliana de excedentes económicos tanto a productores como a consumidores, en donde a partir de una situación de equilibrio del mercado, un factor exógeno -la tecnología -cambia la situación de oferta inicial, incrementando las cantidades ofrecidas, a menores costos por unidad de producto y generando un flujo de beneficios económicos que reciben tanto los productores como los consumidores.Los despIazarnientos de la función de oferta a través del tiempo están sincronizados con el proceso de adopción tecnológica, por lo cual el modelo simula el proceso de difusión y adopción de la nueva tecnología a través del tiempo y calcula los beneficios tecnológicos año por año. (Rivas et al, 1999) La furmulación matemática del modelo parte de un sistema simultáneo de ecuaciones del tipo Cobb Douglas, con elasticidades constantes, las cuales reflejan las condiciones de oferta y demanda del mercado y se adiciona una tercera ecuación que representa la condición de equilibrio del mismo. Dicha formulación matemática se expresa como:Da, = /3(1 + a)' P\"(1)(2)(3) donde:Da' = Cantidad del producto a demandada en el mercado en el periodo t a = Tasa anual de crecimiento de la demanda del producto a por factores autónomos /3 = Intercepto de la función de demanda 11= Elasticidad precio de la demanda del producto aSiendo Qo e la producción observada en Colombia en el año inicial y iJQc el cambio en términos absolutos de la producción nacional entre el año inicial (1967) y el año final (1997).Los mctores individuales de expansión de la oferta de arroz en Colombia, resultantes de la adopción de nuevas tecnologías de producción en A&O yen el resto del país, se calculan como:K A&O representa el factor de expansión de la oferta nacional debido a la adopción tecnológica en A&O y KI/C es el mctor de la expansión de la oferta, resultante de la adopción de nuevas tecno logias de arroz en las otras regiones del territorio nacional.Aplicando las formulas anteriores se obtienen los meto res de expansión de la oferta de arroz que se muestran en el Cuadro 11.Los parámetros económicos permiten introducir al modelo las especificidades del mercado de un determinado producto, en este caso el de arroz, en términos de sus elasticidades precio de oferta y demanda, precio mínimo de oferta, tasas de crecimiento autónomas de oferta y de demanda y la situación de equilibrio inicial de dicho mercado, antes de producirse el proceso de adopción tecnológica. Los parámetros económicos utilizados se presentan en el Cuadro 12.  , 1974;Sanint et al, 1985;Scobie y Posada, 1977;Gutiérrez, 1996. En razón de que el proceso de adopción tecno lógica en arroz, ha sido muy dinámico lográndose el techo de adopción en unos cuantos años, contrario a lo que sucede con las pasturas, se puede considerar que es un proceso maduro, en el cual las nuevas variedades y técnicas de producción son rápidamente adoptadas por los productores.El cambio técnico ha sido de gran intensidad y cobertura. La gran mayoría de los productores del país ha estado usando permanentemente las nuevas variedades y métodos de producción de arroz generados por los sistemas de producción nacional e internacional de investigació n.  Colombia:1967Colombia: -1997 Solo productores muy marginales, pertenecientes al sistema de secano manual, han quedado por fuera del cambio técnico.El impacto del desarrollo tecnológico sobre la producción y los precios de mercado ha sido de gran magnitud. En el período 1967-1997 la producción colombiana de arroz más que se duplicó y los precios reales del mercado declinaron 42%. En MO durante el evaluado la producción se incrementó en 240%. Los rendimientos del cuhivo crecieron notoríamente, 104% en promedio para todo el país y 148% en MO. (Cuadro11)Las ganancias en productividad permitieron expandir sustancialmente la producción, con un incremento muy moderado de las superficies cultivadas, en efecto el área arrocera total en Colombia solo creció 36% y en A&O 37% durante el período de evaluación Para estimar el valor de los beneficios sociales recibidos por los consumidores y por los productores, se corrió el modelo MODEXC con los parámetros técnicos y económicos anteriormente descritos.Las figuras 22 y 23 muestran las cantidades y precios anuales de equilibrio, observadas y estimadas por el modelo, a través del período de evaluación.Las cifras del VP de los beneficios sociales logrados, luego de un proceso de 30 años de cambio técnico, en el que las variedades mejoradas de arroz jugaron un papel muy importante, tanto en Colombia como en la Amazonia & Orinoquia del país, se muestran en el Cuadro 13. El VP estimado para todo el país de los beneficios a productores y consumidores derivados del cambio técnico analizado se sitúa en casi us$1.3 billones, equivalentes a una anualidad de u$136 millones durante 30 años.Para tener una idea de la magnitud relativa de las cifras anteriores, se puede señalar que el valor presente de los beneficios totales, es muy similar a la cifra que el gobierno colombiano espera recibir de Estados Unidos como apoyo al Plan Colombia.En 1997 la producción co lombiana de arroz estimó en us$ 551 millones a precios al productor y en us$ 1.4 billones a precios al consumidor, dado lo anterior la anualidad estimada (us$ 136 millones), representa una cuarta parte del valor de la producción de 1997 si ésta se valora aprecios del productor y aproximadamente una décima parte si la valoración se efectúa a precios del consumidor.El VP de los beneficios derivados de la modernización del cultivo de arroz en A&O se estimó en us$ 359 millones, equivalentes a una anualidad de us$ 38 millones.Los beneficios totales atribuibles a la adopción tecnológica en A&O, representan el 28% de los beneficios totales del país, porcentaje que es muy consistente con la participación de esa región en la producción arrocera nacional.(25% en 1997).El cambio tecnológico observado fue sesgado en beneficio de los consumidores, quienes captaron la mayor parte de los mismos, gracias a la caída de los precios y al incremento de las cantidades consumidas.La tecnología evaluada representa el cOrYunto de nuevas opciones de germoplasma, insumos y formas de producción, adoptadas por los productores durante ese periodo y los esfuerzos de diversas instituciones nacionales e internacionales que hicieron contribuciones de diferente naturaleza, tanto en el desarrollo de las nuevas técnicas como en los procesos de extensión y de difusión.Los beneficios a los productores se concentran en aquellos que adoptaron las nuevas tecnologías, el sector de productores más marginal, aquel que utiliza el sistema de secano manual, al no incrementar su productividad frente a las bajas de precios del mercado, perdió competitividad y sus áreas plantadas decayeron notoriamente. Es así como en 1967 el secano manual contabilizaba un área cuhivada de 1 g 1 mil hectáreas (62% del total nacional) yen 1997 se estimaba en solo 20 mil hectáreas la superficie bajo tal modalidad de cultivo. (Fedearroz, 1998) Es probable que algunas áreas que antiguamente estaban en secano manual se hayan reconvertido principalmente a secano mecanizado, mientras que los productores que no lo hicieron as~ han salido de la actividad y se constituyeron en perdedores netos dentro del proceso de cambio técnico.IX Ahorro de tierra por el uso de nuevas tecnologías de arrozComo se señaló anteriormente los incrementos de productividad implican un ahorro de tierra ya que se pueden generar mayores volúmenes de producción con los mismos o menores recursos de tierra que se empleaban con la tecnología tradicional.El alza dramática de la producción por hectárea en Colombia y en la Amazonia y Orinoquia, ha con\\levado un importante ahorro de tierra. Se estima que en todo el país las nuevas tecnologías permitieron un ahorro cercano a! medio millón de hectáreas en 1999. De ese tota! aproximadamente un 39% (186 mil hectáreas) se ubica en A&O. El ahorro de tierra del año en referencia en Colombia equivale al 110% de la superficie cultivada en ese año. Lo anterior significa que de no haber ocurrido la modernización de la producción arrocera en el país, el área cultivada que en 1999 era de 431 mil hectáreas, se hubiese más que duplicado llegando a 905 mil hectáreas.Se estima que en A& O en 1997 en condiciones de tecnología tradicional el cultivo de arroz hubiese ocupada una superficie de 308 mil hectáreas, más del doble de las que efectivamente utilizó.En la Figuras 24 Y 25 se presenta la evolución en el tiempo de los ahorros de tierra en Colombia y en A&O, propiciadas por la modernización del cultivo de arroz.  1967 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 - En el presente estudio se ha efectuado una evaluación del impacto ex-post de los procesos de adopción de nuevas tecnologías de producción en dos actividades agropecuarias muy importantes en A&O corno son la ganadería vacuna y el cultivo del arroz.Las dos presentan patrones de adopción diferentes que responden a sus distintas particularidades económicas, de la calidad y cantidad de recursos disponibles, de su organización gremial, de la disponibilidad de insumas y de infraestructura y de los riegos de diferente naturaleza que enfrenta cada una de ellas.El proceso de desarrollo y adopción de nueva tecnologias de arroz ha sido uno de los éxitos de mayor resonancia no solo en Colombia, sino en América Latina en general Por tratarse de un cultivo de ciclo corto, una elevada proporción de las inversiones y de los gastos en este cultivo se recuperan en un lapso relativamente breve.Por el contrario, la ganadería en particular la de tipo extensivo como la de A&O, presenta ciclos de producción de 4, 5 Y hasta más años, que implican mantener una alta proporción de la inversión en la finca (pastos y ganado) inmovilizados durante el ciclo productivo. Esto determina que el productor ganadero frente al de arroz, tiene menor flexibilidad para cambiar sus estrategias de producción y sus decisiones de inversión. Estas particularidades ayudan a explicar, aunque sea parcialmente, las diferencias observadas en los patrones de adopción.La evaluación del impacto de la adopción de nuevos forrajes se efectuó en dos áreas muy específicas de la región bajo estudio. Aprovechando los trabajos de seguimiento de la adopción de pastos, efectuados en el pasado por CIAT en la zona de Puerto López-Puerto Gaitán en la Altillanura colombiana y en el Caquetá, se estimaron en términos monetarios, los incrementos de productividad implicados en el proceso de adopción de nuevas pasturas.Aunque la adopción de pasturas no ha sido tan generalizado corno la del arroz, las observaciones de la región de Puerto López-Puerto Gaitán, penniten inferir que hubo gran dinámica en el uso de nuevos materiales forrajeros corno las brachiarias y las pasturas mezcladas de gramíneas y de leguminosas. El gran interrogante que surge es que si esa dinámica se mantuvo, en las fases posteriores al período de observación (1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992).Las díficiles condiciones económicas yde orden público de la nación, en especial durante los tres últimos años de la década pasada no penniten albergar mucho optimismo con respecto a la expansión de la superficie en pastos mejorados en A&O. En consecuencia, se adoptaron supuestos muy conservadores para las estimaciones del área en pasturas durante el período 1993-2000.La otra región de evaluación fue el piedemonte del Caquetá, en donde el CIAT conjuntamente con la firma Nestlé de Colombia, efectuó dos muestreos en 1986 y 1997, para estudiar la adopción de pasturas en esa región del país. Al igual que en los Llanos, en el Caquetá las nuevas pasturas presentaron un alto ritmo de crecimiento, observándose un importante proceso de sustitución de pasturas nativas por pastos mejorados y una diversificación del germoplasma forrajero, en un proceso donde la Brachiaria decumbens el pasto mejorado más común, progresivamente ba sido reemplazado por las nuevas especies de brachiaria: Dictyoneura, humidicola y brizantba.Para elaborar las estimaciones de las áreas en pastos mejorados del periodo posterior al de observación, por las razones anteriormente señaladas, se adoptaron supuestos conservadores sobre el crecimiento del área en pastizales.La evolución se ba efectuado empleando principalmente la información obtenida en trabajos pasados del CIA T en la región bajo análisis, en particular en el caso de las pasturas. En cierta forma es tomar la historia, para elaborar proyecciones, pero teniendo presente que el pasado no es totalmente extrapolable, ya que mucbas de las condiciones económicas, sociales y políticas que tuvieron vigencia en el pasado, en la actualidad ya no la tienen.Para la evaluación del cultivo de arroz se contó con información histórica para todo el período evaluado.Debido a la naturaleza de la calidad de la información disponible y a la intensidad y cobertura de los dos procesos de adopción, en ganadería y en arroz, se emplearon enfoques metodológicos diferentes para estimar el impacto logrado.La evaluación en ganadería incluye los impactos sobre la productividad y sobre el uso de tierra. La del impacto en arroz es más completa, e integra las ganancias en productividad, las reducciones del precio en el mercado y el ahorro de tierra debido al empleo de mejores técnicas productivas.En ambos casos el impacto obtenido en términos económicos es muy significativo: Para comparar los logros en pasturas como los de arroz, es conveniente tener presente que: En las primeras se ha evaluado un periodo más corto, en áreas específicas de A&O. En el segundo, la evaluacíón representa tres décadas de cambio técnico, de gran intensidad y cobertura no solo en A&O sino en todo el país.El VP de las ganancias de productividad debido a la adopción de pasturas en la zona de Puerto López -Puerto Gaitán se estima que pueden llegar a ns$ 44 millones, equivalentes a una anualidad de us$ 5 millones, en el período 1978-2000.En el piedemonte del Caquetá en el período 1986 -2000 el VP se estima en us$ 23 millones, que anualizados equivalen a us$ 3 millones.El ahorro en tierra relacionado con el cambio técnico observado en el año 2000 se estima en un cuarto de millón de hectáreas en Puerto López -Puerto Gaitán y cerca de 30 mil hectáreas en el piedemonte caqueteño.El impacto económico del cambio técnico en arroz en Colombia y en A&O es de gran magnitud en términos monetarios y en cuanto al ahorro de tierra utilizada por el cultivo .Para el país en conjunto los beneficios económicos del periodo 1967-1997, expresados como valor presente se estiman en us$ 1.2 billones, que en términos de una anualidad equivalen us$136 millones. Para dar una idea de la magnitud relativa de estas cifras se puede anotar que la producción colombiana de arroz en 1997 valorada a precios al productor se calculó en us$ 551 millones y en us$ 1.4 billones a precios al consumidor.Lo anterior implica que la anualidad de los beneficios tecnológicos equivale cerca de una cuarta parte del valor de la producción de 1997, si ésta se valora a precios del productor y a una décima parte si la valoración se hace a precios del consumidor.Los beneficios del cambio técnico en el cultivo de arroz en A&O se estiman en us$ 359 millones, equivalentes a una anualidad de us$38 millones. Estos valores son congruentes con la participación de A&O en la producción arrocera nacional, ya que ellos representan el 28% de los beneficios totales del país.Dada la caída de los precios reales al consumidor durante el período evaluada y el poco nivel de apertura de dicho mercado, los mayores beneficiados con la adopción de nuevas tecnologías de arroz han sido los consumidores. La región de A&O se caracteriza por su baja densidad de población, lo cual le permite ser una exportadora neta de alimentos y materias primas al resto del país. En consecuencia, el grueso de los beneficios se ha concentrado en los consumidores urbanos, en particular en los de Bogotá, el principal centro consumidor de la nación.Los beneficios tecnológicos estimados tanto en forrajes como en arroz resultan del esfuerzo conjunto, en diferentes etapas del desarrollo y difusión de las nuevas tecnologías, de numerosas entidades nacionales e internacionales, públicas y privadas, que han colaborado en la modernización del sector agropecuario nacional.Resulta dificil identificar exactamente la contribución individual de cada una de ellas, sobre todo teniendo en cuenta que se trata de una función de producción tecnológica, en el que cada insumo institucional, es absolutamente necesario para que los otros expresen plenamente todo su potencial.Es dificil y complicado determinar todos los costos y las inversiones efectuados por las diversas instituciones en el transcurso del tiempo, por lo cual elaborar indicadores de eficiencia económica de las inversiones efectuadas, tales como tasas internas de retomo (TIR) o relación beneficio/costo (B/C), en el momento no es posible. Sin embargo hay que anotar los montos de los beneficios superan largamente los gastos anuales en investigación y desarrollo. ISNAR elaboró una encuesta en el país para estimar las inversiones en ciencia y tecnología de los sectores público y privado y estimó que en 50 .• 1991 en us$ de 1985, tales gastos estaban alrededor de 100 millones. (Falconi & Pardey, 1993) Es importante destacar el rol que han desempeñado centros internacionales de investigación como el CIAT y el IRRI, en un esfuerzo conjunto con las instituciones nacionales, para lograr estos impactos tecnológicos. Esto pone de presente que este tipo de asociaciones resuhan muy beneficiosas y potencializan el esfuerzo nacional por hacer mas eficiente y sostenible la producción agropecuaria.Los resultados que arroja la evaluación efectuada llevan a reflexionar sobre el impacto del cambio técnico y su dimensión temporal Para la evaluación del impacto técnico se requiere una visión de largo plazo, en un proceso donde a través de los años se van logrando resultados intermedios, que conducen a los impactos finales de largo plazo.Estos úhimos están más íntimamente ligados con las metas sociales de desarrollo como alivio de la pobreza, conservación del medio ambiente y de los de recursos naturales y crecimiento de la economía.Esto implica que se requiere un seguimiento sistematizado de los resuhados intermedios que se van logrando en el tiempo, con el propósito de entender el proceso y aplicar los correctivos necesarios cuando se detecten ful1as o cuellos de botella y asegurar que el trabajo de investigación y desarrollo efectuado, tendrá a largo plazo un claro impacto social.","tokenCount":"10977"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"419965e350f3bd3ce2df3b202130f04c","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/95c05ffb-6ff4-447f-83db-23fed616646f/retrieve","id":"-99525236"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"3a4e39ee-aa67-46a8-b123-d8ba8908d82d","pagecount":"12","content":"The objective of this half-day meeting was to share key elements of ILRI's strategy 2013-2022 whilst at the same time providing an opportunity for key stakeholders to have an opportunity to engage and consider implications for livestock research for development in East and South East Asia. 24 participants (Appendix 4) from East and Southeast Asia attended, representing 7 countries in the region.Steve Staal, ILRI's recently appointed regional representative for East and South East Asia, welcomed participants, explaining the aim of the meeting being twofold, to launch ILRI's new strategy in the region, and provide an opportunity for discussions as an early step in ILRI's increased engagement in the region, given his recent appointment as regional representative for East and South East Asia.Professor Charan Chantalakhana gave opening remarks, welcoming participants and stressing the increasing importance of the livestock sector for the region. A former member of ILRI's Board of Trustees, he welcomed ILRI and its intentions to increase its presence and research in the Region.Participants were then introduced to the strategy development process, strategic issues and overview of key elements and invited to comment on the extent to which the changes and issues resonate in the region, and what may be initial opportunities for ILRI to engage.Participants agreed that the proposed changes to ILRI's strategy and the strategic issues that had been articulated to inform the strategy resonated well in the region. In particular, it was stated that they mirrored government priorities in Indonesia and with FAO.From the card exercise, participants articulated a number of opportunities and key challenges in the region that were germane to ILRI's role. These included issues related to system change and market integration; environmental sustainability and resilience as well as issues related to climate change. Issues concerning investment, partnerships and capacity development were also mentioned. Delivering sustainably at scale was recognized to be important and there were a number of specific comments mostly about particular livestock diseases.In the ensuing plenary discussion these issues were reiterated and elaborated. The need to develop a regional strategy was stressed, including identifying the issues particular to China. In many cases the rapidly changing regional dynamics and impacts on the livestock sector need to be taken into account, meaning more emphasis on the private sector, thinking beyond smallholder farmers to medium scale enterprises, etc.Issues raised in relation to the science agenda included taking account of the role of private investors, some of whom may do research, improving management efficiency, and opportunities for testing, piloting and learning systematically from these. Links between research and extension should be further clarified in relation to the issue of achieving results at scale. Many participants stressed the importance of partnerships in this regard.There was considerable interest and discussion regarding the Strategic Objective on Influencing Decision Makers. Many participants stressed the importance of this, and appreciated ILRI's potential role. There was also general consensus that the institute should not undertake advocacy directly, but rely on partners for such, and focus on providing appropriate and relevant evidence. Advocacy activities would undermine credibility and social capital. Several country-specific examples were mentioned where science based information would be relevant in raising policy makers' awareness and investments. Capacity development was seen as important, and with many facets. It was also stressed that ILRI cannot work alone in this domain and again needs to work closely with others, notably FAO and ensuring that roles are clear. It was also recognized that capacity development does not have to be formalized and that facilitating regional interactions and knowledge sharing have important roles in this regard.Presentation on ILRI SE Asia today (Appendix 3) Participants welcomed ILRI's initiatives -on going and planned in the region. Mentioned in particular in this regard were issues related to going beyond production to consumption and marketing, value chains and food safety issues. Sustainable intensification is a key issue as well, with many related research questions including environmental dimensions and the relationship to feeds (with the idea of a 'feeds research cluster' mentioned).Participants were in agreement that a major role for ILRI is as a facilitator and coordinator, an infocentre to gather, store and share data. Roles vis a vis FAO would need to be clarified in this regard, stressing ILRI's role at the forefront of new science and research results; FAO more towards the application/use of existing and proven knowledge. FAO also has an important networking and convening role, given its links to government structures. ILRI's role in informing, shaping and focusing its own as well as national research agendas was also stressed, and a number of specific research topics such as one health, animal nutrition, integration and use of high end biosciences, crop livestock integration/intensification, transboundary disease and trade issues were raised. Participants are keen to see ILRI take action as soon as possible, beginning with articulation of priorities, building strategic partnerships and strengthening its presence in the region. One immediate action is to share past research results, and make these more accessible in the region. A regional coordination meeting may also be required, as will engagement with donors to raise resources.Appendix 1: Notes from discussions on opportunities for ILRI in the region- Already a number of middle income economies and incomes will grow rapidly. Not sure food security and poverty reduction for this region will be the issue for a long time, at least in comparison to issues such as sustainability or the effects of externalities on non-livestock keepers. This demands a bigger picture of the livestock sector -such as disease, resilience against climate change, and there may be instances where it is appropriate to scale back livestock production where there may be potential negative repercussions. But there are also opportunities such as the use of agriculture by products which has a number of key outstanding questions.Note: In Lao PDR, 2% of national budget is for agriculture, with 2% of that for smallholder dairy farmers.Need to explore the extent to which an international research organization should be involved in advocacy activities. Probably other partners can do this better.Need to make sure private sector engagement is not excluded, and recognize this in relation to medium scale farmers -who should also be included in the clientele.Ask the right research questions; make sure outputs lead to outcomes (beyond research papers). Many participants stressed the need for greater regional collaboration, with ILRI seen to have a role in facilitating this, including in the area of knowledge management and information sharing.Appendix 2: Notes on plenary discussion on ILRI strategy Science, influence (private investors also important here), management efficiency are the most important! Science -usually evokes a certain kind of knowledge. For livestock -traditional knowledge is also very important. Emphasis on influencing practices -at the end of the day, there are different pathways to achieve this. Testing, piloting etc. also recognize that there are many that exist and there are barriers that can be worked on in this regard. Should we focus on transfer -or on creating an environment for adoption of practices that are already good? It may not be a trade-off, ILRI could be spread too thin by doing everything.Influencing decision makers: for Philippines. Import a lot of livestock products and population is growing rapidly. Budget for agriculture is very small, and livestock (dairy) even smaller within this. Happy to see that not only research as generating publications, but to see outcomes and influence decision makers.Clearly, more money is needed for livestock sector. This is difficult for those within the national system, because issues can become politicized. This means there is a role for ILRI but it cannot directly undertake advocacy. Achieving a balance through partnering will be key, as will providing evidence that people can really use.In some cases -livestock may be an expression of poverty? Does evidence support this -or (as in Philippines -the other way round?)Influence decision makers -how to tailor research so it is useful to influence? Getting the science rightask the right questions? Do the solid science? Decision makers will want the whole body of evidence, and beyond -to food systems etc. Better lives through livestock! Good. GDP from livestock is small in some countries. Small farmers -there are many even though the produce few/small -but added together there are many. Governments listen to people. Implication is that ILRI needs to look at small farmer. Even though livestock may not be the first priority. Need however to look at the whole system and consider the role of livestock. Utilization of crop residues etc. Crop-animal systems are really important. 'Value' = not only money.FAO has a big part to support government in Indonesia. Important -for government officers, because of promotion. Need for strategy on how to maintain the assets. Officers in provinces -difficulty to maintain the capacity. Need to find a way to improve. And to ensure funding for this.May not be only formal capacity development. More working together eg amongst SE Asia countries. Not necessarily moving the dairy but also exchanging scientists; collaboration amongst researchers; capacity amongst researchers On science -working with many international partners -conveying the answer to a questioncollaborative efforts with other international partners is really important. Eg quarterly donor coordination (including international partners) together with government -share findings/activities/ and ensure synergy not duplication or overlap.Working with the human health sector is important eg one health approach. Features in Indonesiaministry of agriculture / ministry of health dealing with zoonoses.Some countries already have a livestock strategy up to 2020 or 2030 (eg Vietnam). If we have thisshould pick …from different country's livestock strategy in order to make it more specific for the region.In Vietnam. Livestock has become more important. Total GDP is more than 30% of agriculture. And almost 7% for global GDP. Challenge to balance between crop and livestock. Crop, livestock, forestry, fisheries are the four sectors -but crops 57% of total investment. Now a problem between export and balancing import of livestock feed ingredients. 30 million dollars in …imported to feed livestock system! How to balance? No allocation of land to livestock production. More than 55% livestock products come from small households -not industrial sector. But issues of food safety, biosecurity etc. how to market the products appropriately (middlemen).Cooperation between 11 countries to control diseases is important. ILRI has a role here.","tokenCount":"1698"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"16a86b1a0c42bc5173dd169cca5643a4","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://repository.cimmyt.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e783b1f7-a305-4082-b21c-ead6f9d547ab/content","id":"-1857823999"},"keywords":["Sustainable intensification","vulnerability","whole-farm model","health shock"],"sieverID":"9ae217dc-bd46-4d1f-9be1-bb97f5ddde96","pagecount":"29","content":"Smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana regularly face shocks, challenging the sustainability of their farms and livelihoods. Different farm households and household members may be differently affected and respond with different coping strategies. We combined whole-farm modelling and farmer consultations to investigate the vulnerability, buffer and adaptive capacity of three farm types in Northern Ghana towards severe climate, economic and social shocks. We further assessed intrahousehold differences in respective risk mitigation and coping strategies. Our model results indicate that the drought shock would most severely affect all farm types, drastically reducing their operating profits and soil organic matter balance. The medium resource endowed farm was most affected by shocks, but all farm types could enhance their capacity to recover by adopting technology packages for sustainable intensification. Gendered coping strategies included livestock sales, post-harvest storage, activating social networks, rice processing and the collection, processing and sales of wild nuts and fruits. Farmers reported to aim at becoming more resilient by increasing their herd size and expanding their farmland, thereby risking to increase rather than reduce the pressure on natural resources. New questions arise concerning the carrying capacity of local ecosystems and resilience at community and landscape level.Building sustainable and resilient food production systems worldwide is one of today's greatest challenges (Cui et al., 2018;FAO, 2015): while global food demand is projected to double between 2005 and 2050 (Tilman et al., 2011), climate change increases production-related uncertainties (IPCC, 2014) and fertile agricultural lands diminish (Abass et al., 2018;Bren d'Amour et al., 2017;IPCC, 2019;Lambin & Meyfroidt, 2011;Montanarella et al., 2016). Visions for multi-functional, circular and biodiverse agricultural production systems that provide equitable and food secure livelihoods (Chaplin-Kramer et al., 2023) need to consider how agricultural systems cope with shocks. Globally, most agricultural systems are exposed and vulnerable to shocks like infestations of crops by pests, disturbances caused by extreme weather conditions, market price fluctuations and labour shortages (Barbier et al., 2009;Birthal & Hazrana, 2019;Groot et al., 2016;Urruty et al., 2016). Smallholders, constituting about 83% of all farm systems globally (Lowder et al., 2016), have been described as particularly vulnerable to shocks due to their high dependency on agriculture for food and income as well as their limited access to formal safety nets (Harvey et al., 2018(Harvey et al., , 2014;;Mashizha, 2019;Muthelo et al., 2019). Previous publications have described the vulnerability to shocks, coping strategies and/or resilience of smallholder farmers (Akponikpè et al., 2011;Barbier et al., 2009;Ghimire et al., 2010;Mertz et al., 2009;Nicod et al., 2020), repeatedly describing women as particularly vulnerable to shocks like droughts and floods and as adopting different coping strategies than men (Assan et al., 2018;FAO, 2018;Magombeyi & Taigbenu, 2008). Factors such as household resource endowment and gendered differences in production have been described as important discriminants for farm management practices and farmers`rooms to manoeuvre (Kuivanen et al., 2016a(Kuivanen et al., , 2016b;;Michalscheck et al., 2019Michalscheck et al., , 2018;;Timler et al., 2017). However, little attention has been paid jointly to site-specific intra-and inter-household differences in resilience. Our main research question is thus whether and how different farm households (farm types) and household members (farmer types) evince different vulnerabilities, coping strategies and pathways of recovery from shocks. Concretely we ask: what are the main shocks affecting farms and farmers at a particular location, how do particular shock scenarios affect them and how are they able to recover with versus without particular sets of good agricultural practices.In this study, we build on existing work on farm and farmer diversity in Duko, Northern Ghana, to systematically investigate and describe intra-and interhousehold differences in terms of the vulnerability to prevalent shocks. We then continue investigating whether local farms and farmers have different strategies and capacities to recover with and without adopting project-proposed technologies for sustainable agricultural intensification. We thus differentiate between the buffer (without new technologies) and adaptive (with new technologies) capacity of farm households (Groot et al., 2016). We acknowledge that farmers deliberately prepare for and attempt to reduce risk, i.e. their transformative capacity (Arnall, 2015). We assess the vulnerability and coping strategies under four severe shock scenarios: a drought, a fall army worm (FAW) infestation, a decline in product price, and a reduction in labour availability. The selection and definition of shock scenarios were based on a participatory assessment and literature review (cf. 3.4 and 3.6). We built upon an existing farm and farmer typology (Michalscheck et al., 2018) to determine differences in the shock-specific vulnerability and coping strategies of different farms and farmers. We furthermore explored differences in their ability to recover, comparing scenarios with and without the adoption of technologies and techniques for sustainable intensification (SI) (Groot et al., 2016) at farm-household level. We used the whole-farm model FarmDESIGN as well as systematic farmer consultations to determine the impact as well as coping strategies per shock. We hypothesized that the general resilience of a farm household increases together with the household's resource endowment and that farm systems become more resilient through the adoption of SI technologies and techniques.In this manuscript, we first provide a brief overview of our conceptual framework, followed by the methods section, introducing the case study site, describing the local farm types, the SI-technology packages and the shock scenarios. We then explain the general functionality and specific use of the whole-farm model FarmDESIGN as well as the design and implementation of the participatory assessment. Finally, we present and discuss our results, their transferability and the implications for technology-scaling efforts of local research for development projects.Sustainable farming systems provide food and income as well as soil health and other ecosystem functions (Dahlin & Rusinamhodzi, 2019). They need to maintain their functions over time and in the face of shocks or stresses, i.e. farming systems need to be resilient. Their resilience, according to Meuwissen et al. (2019), can be described by defining the resilience of what (type of farming system), to what (shocks), for what (functions), with what resilience capacities and attributes. With resilience capacities, the authors (Meuwissen et al., 2019) refer to the systems' robustness, adaptability and transformability. Robustness is defined as the capacity to withstand stresses and shocks (Meuwissen et al., 2019;Walker, 2020). Adaptability is the capacity to alter management decisions (e.g. on inputs, production or marketing) without implementing structural or other fundamental changes to the farm system (Meuwissen et al., 2019). Transformability refers to the capacity to significantly change the structure and feedback mechanisms of the farm system in response to severe shocks or enduring stress (Meuwissen et al., 2019). The resilience capacities are thus an expression of a farming systems' conservation-versus reorganization-options to attenuate or to react to a shock (Ansah et al., 2019;Béné et al., 2012;Meuwissen et al., 2019). With resilience attributes Meuwissen et al. (2019) refer to features that enhance resilience, such as diversity, openness, tightness of feedbacks, system reserves or modularity. Building on work by Jentoft et al. (2007), Biggs et al. (2012) distinguish between the (farming) systems' properties, and the governance system attributes that enhance resilience.We build on the conceptual elements of Meuwissen et al. (2019) and cluster the two latter ones (capacities and attributes) into the description of resilience 'through what' i.e. we ask what are the features and strategies by different farms and farmers to prepare for, cope with and recover from shocks. In line with Darnhofer et al. (2010), we define a shock as a severe and unexpected or sudden perturbation, differing from permanent challenges or steadily increasing pressures to a farm's performance. We further define vulnerability as the shock-related setback a farming system experiences in its functions and respective performance indicators. A low or no setback in performance after shock would indicate a high respective robustness or adaptability. After a shock, to analyse the recovery, we differentiate between the buffer and adaptive capacity of a farming system (Groot et al., 2016). The buffer capacity refers to a scenario where a farm household uses and re-arranges the current farm components (crop and livestock types and management practices), while the adaptive capacity refers to a scenario where a household can source from additional components (technology packages for sustainable intensification). Within this framework, we thus investigate, whether and in how far the SI-technology packages constitute important resilience attributes for the different farm types and whether they strengthen their resilience capacities. Figure 1 summarizes our conceptual framework.To achieve a nuanced resilience assessment, we built on previous insights on local farm and farmer diversity as well as on local agronomic-trial data (Sections 3.3.2-3.3.2). We then combined own community and expert consultations (Section 3.5), with local definitions of severe shocks (Section 3.6) and quantitative whole-farm modelling (Section 3.7). In line with the UN FAO (2012), we operationalized the resilience concept by capturing changes in farm performance, both during and after shock. During a shock year, we captured the vulnerability of a farming system as the percentual setback in its performance indicators. After a shock, we used the model to explore options for farm-performance oriented, structural re-arrangements for recovery per farm type. We measured a farming systems ability to recover by its improvements in the performance indicators in comparison to the shocked and the original (baseline) state. Our insights into local resilience capacities and attributes were complemented by qualitative farmer reports on coping strategies adopted at the individual-level to buffer food and income shocks.This study was conducted in Duko (9.56°N−0.83°W), a Dagomba farm community situated north of the regional capital Tamale in the Northern Region of Ghana, see Figure 2. This area is part of the Guinea Savannah agro-ecological zone with a unimodal rainfall regime and an annual precipitation of 1000-1200 mm (FAO, 2005). Farm systems in Duko are rainfed, mixed crop-livestock systems: farmers grow cereals (maize, rice, millet), tubers (yam, cassava, sweet potato), legumes (cowpea, soybean, groundnut, bambara bean) as well as dry season vegetables (tomato, okra, onion, chili pepper, green leafy vegetables). Depending on their resource endowment, farmers in Duko also own cattle, donkeys, small ruminants and poultry. Farm households retain a portion of their produce for their own consumption and sell the remainder. Duko hosts about 54 large, maleheaded and polygamous households, predominantly adhering to Muslim religion. Depending on their gender, household members engage in farming, trading or off-farm activities: household heads are typically responsible for the households' food security, growing staple crops such as maize and yam. The wives are commonly responsible for providing a nutritionally diverse diet to the household. For this purpose they grow soup ingredients like groundnuts and vegetables (Apusigah, 2009;Padmanabhan, 2007). Despite their agricultural activities, women in Duko are described as traders rather than farmers; they buy, process and sell produce in order to make an extra income e.g. to cover the children's basic school fees (Mohammed, 2015). If a household has sufficient land and labour available, adult sons may cultivate own plots, growing cash crops like rice or cowpea to pay for higher education or marriage (I. B. Mohammed, personal communication, 2016).In the decade 2010-2020 farmers in Duko have been affected by various severe droughts (2010, 2011 and 2019: severe yield loss), severe price shocks (i.a. 2019, rice, −60% of previous market value) and crop pests (FAW infestation since 2017). Farmers also repeatedly report labour shortfalls due to illness, death or out-migration. The recent Covid-19 pandemic constitutes another severe health and economic shock that was not yet recorded in the surveys underlying this study. Despite common features and structures, the farm households of Duko may be grouped into different farm types.While in East, Central and Southern Africa farming systems can broadly be characterized as maize mixed farming systems, the West African Savannah systems are described as cereal root crop mixed farming systems (Dixon et al., 2020). For Northern Ghana, Kuivanen et al. (2016aKuivanen et al. ( , 2016b) ) and Signorelli (2016) developed farm typologies for smallholders that grouped farms and farmers according to their resource endowment. Michalscheck et al. (2018) consolidated and combined their insights into a framework describing a vertical (within) and a horizontal (among households) dimension of diversity in local farm systems. In Duko, low resource endowed (LRE) farm households are characterized by small land holdings (0.8-2.0 ha), mostly growing maize, rearing no or only few livestock (poultry) and having no private means of motorized transport, at most a bicycle. Medium resource endowed (MRE) households typically cultivate about two hectares of land, rearing sheep or goats, and likely owning bicycles and/or a motorbike. The relatively high resource endowed (HRE) households in Duko may cultivate four hectares or more, likely owning cattle, small ruminants and poultry; their houses have zinc roofs instead of thatch and most likely they own one or more motorbikes or even a small lorry (motor king). Figure 3 illustrates three case study farms, which are selected actual farms each representing one farm type (Michalscheck et al., 2018). We applied the outlined farm typology to systematically describe differences among and within local farm households in terms of their resilience and the utility of the different technology packages. In the technology parks, each trial includes a control field where farmers grow crops in the traditional manner and a treatment field, where a new technology is tested and compared to the control. Selected farmers also implement trials on their own fields, whether as baby trials (15 × 15 m 2 ) or upscaled trials (0.405 ha), for which they receive farming guidance and inputs (seeds, fertilizers, chemicals) from Africa RISING.For the assessment of the farm's adaptive capacities, we considered seven of Africa RISING's technology packages (Table 1): one sole maize package (P1), three legume packages (P2, P3 and P6), two maize-legume intercrop packages (P4 and P5) and one livestock package (P7). The suitability and impact of P1-P5 have been described, modelled and discussed with farmers by Michalscheck et al. (2018). We complemented the existing assessment, by adding the farm-type specific suitability and adoption of P6 and P7 (cf. Section 3.4), capturing related data during field work in November 2019. Table 1 lists and describes each technology package with the assumed changes (inputs, yield, labour) per hectare as compared to the respective traditional practice. For P1-P3 the information about inputs and yields was obtained from project agronomic trial data (Kotu et al., 2016;Larbi et al., 2016aLarbi et al., , 2016b)). Assumptions on yield increases associated with the maize-legume intercrops (P4 and P5) were based on preliminary trial results (Kotu et al., 2017) and literature from West Africa (Dakora et al., 1987;Dakora & Keya, 1997;Horst & Hardter, 1994), assuming the   Fertilizer: 247 kg ha −1 NPK (15:15:15), 247 kg ha −1 SA (total: 90 kg of N ha −1 ) Seeds: Improved seeds (cost: 3.3 GHS kg −1 ), 21 kg ha −1 , row planting Average additional labour: 2.5 h ha −1 ; Assumed yield increase: 25%Fertilizer: 247 kg ha −1 NPK, 123 kg ha −1 SA (total: 60 kg of N ha −1 ) Seeds: recycled seeds, 5 kg ha −1 Seeds planted haphazardly along ploughing lines Improved cowpea variety (e.g. IT 99K 573-1-1), row planting and three sprays with Lambda cyhalothrin (2.5%)Seeds: 20 kg ha −1 (cost: 6.7 GHS kg −1 ), row planting sole cowpea Additional labour (harvesting): 2.5 h ha −1 Labour (per spray): 1.24 h ha −1 Assumed yield increase: 45%Africa RISING uses 'one spray' as a control trial. Seeds: 10 kg ha −1 , improved variety Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) on soybean including inoculum and Triple Super Phosphate (TSP) TSP: 123 kg ha −1 (2.5 GHS kg −1 ) Inoculum: 0.247 kg ha −1 (200 GHS kg −1 ) Seeds: 37 kg ha −1 (cost: 4.6 GHS ha −1 ), row planting; Total additional labour: 18 h ha −1 . Assumed yield increase: 50%.No fertilizer Seeds: 37 kg ha −1 , broadcastedPackage # Description a Assumptions Traditional practice b Maize-legume rotation with 2/3rd of the area grown with maize and 1/3rd with a legume (cowpea or soybean). If the farm area is large enough a 1:1 rotation was assumed.Traditional fertilizer/spray on maize and legumes Additional labour: Maize (+2.5 h ha −1 ) Cowpea (+5 h ha −1 ), Soybean (+1.24 h ha −1 ) Assumed yield increase for rotated maize: 50% compared to maize after maize Cowpea: 2 sprays, 20 kg ha −1 seeds. Soybean: no fertilizerMaize-legume strip cropping: 2 rows of maize, 2 rows of legume, with rotating strips from one year to another Same as for the rotation, except labour: Maize (+3.7 h ha −1 ) Cowpea (+7.4 h ha −1 ), Soybean (+1.85 h ha −1 compared to the baseline).Continuous cultivation of maize (possibly with intercropped legumes)Improved groundnut variety (mani pinta), row planting, spacing (30 cm × 15 cm) Seeds: 37 kg ha −1 (cost: 6 GHS kg −1 ), row planting sole groundnuts; Additional labour (harvesting): + 10%; Assumed yield increase: 80%Seed variety: 'Chinese', recycled; Spacing: 70 × 15most conservative yield increase (50%). Data for P6 (groundnuts) was obtained from Rahman et al.(2020) while information on P7, the livestock package, was based on Konlan et al. (2014) and Avornyo et al. (2019, Personal Communication;2015). The assumptions on labour increases and costs for the different package components of P1-P7 were based on consultations with farmers, Africa RISING staff and Ministry of Food and Agriculture local extension agents. Costs are indicated in GHS (1GHS = 0.13 USD, 18.05.2022).The study took place when farmers had already partially adopted and adapted the technology packages. On the one hand, this provided us with valuable evidence on farmers' actual preferences and choices towards the proposed technologies. On the other hand, to determine the effect of the technologies, we needed to compare the farm with and without the technology packages, which is why we reset the three case study farms to a baseline, with only traditional and no project-proposed practices. We considered the exploration of the farm's adaptive capacities as ex-ante assessments, since we compared past states with possible future states of implementation that had not (yet) been reached (Michalscheck et al., 2018). The information on technology packages was complemented by farmer consultations on shocks.In the process of defining the shock scenarios, we consulted 22 randomly selected farmers in Duko (20 men and two women, including the three case study farm household heads or representatives) as well as the Africa RISING lead farmer. The farmer feedback indicated the importance to include illness, death and out-migration as causes of labour shocks and determined the selection of the locally more important weather shock, namely drought rather than flood. The shock descriptions were as detailed and as precise as possible, ensuring consistence so that any difference in reported vulnerability or coping strategy would indeed be associated to differences in farm resources, capacities and strategies and not caused by a different interpretation of the shock scenarios. We revisited the same case study households described in Michalscheck et al. (2018). We recorded changes in household composition, land use and adoption of technology packages since 2015 to capture the development trajectories per farm.Annual PPR vaccination (2 GHS), bi-annual deworming treatment (each 3 GHS); 3 months of concentrate feed: 22 GHS No vaccination, no deworming, residues and milling waste fed to the animals during the dry season whenever available, otherwise: free range.a All packages furthermore promote the use of residues as green manure or livestock feed instead of burning.bThe traditional practices served as a reference to reset each case study farm to a baseline i.e. to a state without any of the described Africa RISING technology packages.Despite capturing the farm configurations of 2019, our resilience assessment refers to the year 2015, combining the more elaborate existing farm models from 2015 with the most recent knowledge about actual responses to shocks as well as the resulting farm trajectories. We furthermore systematically (cf. household survey in S. Annex 1) collected data on farmers' estimations of the impacts per shock scenario in order to obtain accurate input data for the modelbased whole-farm vulnerability assessment. We also interviewed various household members of our case study farms about the estimated speed of recovery after each shock type and about their strategies for overcoming each shock in order to assess how the model-proposed recovery options fit with their existing coping strategies. Due to time constraints, we interviewed the male household head or their representative (a son of the HRE household) of the case study farms.To contextualize our findings, we furthermore conducted a short resilience-assessment survey (see S. Annex 1 involving 20 men and 2 women). Respondents were asked to evaluate their resilience, at household-and at individual level, on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 expressing no robustness or resilience (high vulnerability with no means of recovery) and 10 being fully robust or resilient (shocks do not affect the household or they can fully recover immediately). Participants were also asked to evaluate their willingness to change farm practices in response to the shocks they face, with a score of 0 indicating no changes and 10 expressing radical changes. We furthermore asked for an evaluation of the respondent's satisfaction with their current resilience, with 0 indicating 'no satisfaction' and 10 'full satisfaction'. For all above-mentioned evaluations (0-10) we used the so-called stick-score method developed by Michalscheck et al. (2019) for measuring abstract concepts like levels of satisfaction and power shares among smallholders. To explore the transferability of our findings from Duko (Northern Region), we held Focus Groups Discussions (FGDs) in each of two other project intervention sites, Nyangua (Upper East Region) and Zanko (Upper West Region), collecting famers' perspectives on the relevance of the four shocks as well as their coping strategies. The FGD findings are presented briefly in the discussion section, when reflecting on the transferability of our insights from Duko. All consultations with local project staff and farmers took place in November 2019. The survey data is provided in S. Annex 3. The farmer consultations constituted a core input for the definition of the four relevant shock scenarios.Besides the farmer consultation, we interviewed academic experts and project staff (F. K. Avornyo, personal communication, 2019;F. Kizito, personal communication, 2019;B. Kotu, personal communication, 2019;S. B. Mellon, personal communication, 2019;I. B. Mohammed, personal communication, 2019), reviewed literature (Bariw et al., 2020;Friesen, 2002;Jarawura, 2014;Mewes, 2018;Olugbenga, 2017;Tambo, 2016;Tambo & Wünscher, 2017) and available data sets (2019) for the case study location. We identified and defined four severe shock scenarios that farmers in Duko may be exposed to:. A severe drought: four weeks of no rainfall in June or July. A time that marks the start of the growing season where crops are tender and in critical growth stages like germination and dry matter accumulation. . A severe Fall Army Worm (FAW) infestation: if no preventive action was taken, 50% of the total plant population would be heavily infested, resulting into maize yield losses of about 60%. . A severe reduction in crop product prices (a price shock): assuming that market prices for maize drop by 50% and by 20% for rice, millet, yam and cassava due to bumper crop and high market supply. . A severe reduction in household labour availability (a labour shock): 50% of total household labour is unavailable during the peak season (e.g. harvesting) due to illness, death or sudden outmigration.Concerning the probability of each of the severe shocks, households were asked about the frequency at which these would occur respectively (S. Annex 3). Their indications on shock frequencies differed, since the same event would affect households differently, ranging from 5-10 years for a severe drought shock, 4-6 years for a severe price shock, 3-20 years for a severe FAW infestation and 2-10 years for a severe labour shock. Regarding the interdependence of the selected shock events: price and yield shocks may reinforce trends of temporal or permanent outmigration, possibly leading to a labour shock.Various additive shock scenarios could be considered and run through the same farm models that we built for the individual shock scenarios. This paper focuses on individual shock scenarios, serving to unpack differences in resilience among farms and farmers. S.Annex 2 provides an overview of the four shock scenarios including their general as well as farm-type specific impacts on individual farm components such as crop yields and labour availability, serving as input-data for the FarmDESIGN model.We employed the whole-farm model FarmDESIGN to assess the resilience i.e. the vulnerability, the buffer and adaptive-capacity of a representative LRE, MRE and HRE farm household in Duko. FarmDESIGN is a bio-economic, static model with a multi-objective optimization algorithm (Groot et al., 2012). FarmDE-SIGN may hence be used for a detailed analysis of the farm performance and resource flows, describing a farm's physical components (field, buildings, animals, crops, organic matter imports), inputs (capital expenditure, labour, fertilizers, pesticides, seeds) and outputs (income, grain yields, animal products). FarmDESIGN also captures information on household composition, labour contributions, offfarm income and expenses (Ditzler et al., 2019) as well as environmental data such as information on the local climate, soils and economic parameters like the national interest rate as well as costs for labour and land. Crop and livestock components are integrated. Due to the built-in multi-objective optimization tool, FarmDESIGN may be used to generate many Pareto-optimal, alternative farm configurations (solution cloud). For the optimization (exploration), we chose three objectives, representing the economic and environmental sustainability, namely to maximize the annual farm operating profit (GHS yr −1 ), labour savings (hours yr −1 ) and the soil organic matter (SOM) balance (kg ha −1 yr −1 ). To model the four shock scenarios, we consulted members of the three case study households on the impact of the shocks on their crop yields, livestock productivity, livestock mortality, labour requirements and sales (Section 3.4). We also consulted agricultural experts (n = 5) including an extension officer, local project and university staff, about the impacts of the shock scenarios on local markets as well as on crop and livestock productivity. We used the insights to manually implement the shocks on each of the baseline farm models, subsequently using the shocked farms for computing the resulting solution spaces (room to manoeuvre) without (buffer capacity) and with (adaptive capacity) the SI technology packages (cf. Section 3.3).S. Annex 2 provides details on the model assumptions and decision variable ranges per scenario. To explore the adaptive capacity, the model was able to adopt the project proposed technology packages or to maintain the current practices, aiming to improve farm performance within the given constraints such as livestock feed requirements and spatial limitations. After setting the decision variables, constraints and objectives, we ran the exploration in FarmDESIGN for 1000 iterations, generating solution clouds of alternative farm configurations. The solution clouds served for a visual comparison of buffer and adaptive capacities as well as to determine the respective attainable maximum values per optimization objective. We modelled 39 farm configurations: per farm type one baseline, four shocks and per shock a model respectively to explore the buffer capacity and the adaptive capacity. All modelled farm configurations may be downloaded as part of the supplementary materials (S. Annex 4). The assumptions and changes underlying individual models are also explained in the respective FarmDESIGN notes, accessible via the model user interface.Preparing for, coping with and recovering from shocks takes place in a complex and highly dynamic environment, shaping and being shaped by the overall development trajectory of a given farm household. We hereby outline the farmer-reported farmspecific development trajectories, the adoption status of the different technology packages and the main changes in their on-and off-farm activities between 2015 and 2019.The LRE farm household increased its farm area (+88%, from 1.6 ha to 3 ha, albeit of low soil quality) and grew a larger variety of crops including rice, yam, okra, tomato and pepper. The LRE household also started rearing poultry, keeping about 20 fowls, and the oldest son left the community for off-farm labour without sending remittances, corresponding to a labour shock. The household head reported to have worked hard, preparing most of the household farmland by hoe, in order to gradually increase the households' income. His wife increased her trading activity and was reported to have been successful in generating an extra income, too. The LRE household seemed to have improved its situation but could still be considered of low resource endowment. Among the technology packages, only P1 (maize) seemed to be relevant to the LRE farm household, since even in 2019 the household did not grow any legumes and had no small ruminants.The MRE household was strongly affected by a conversion of community farmland into building plots, losing about 2 hectares (20%) of their available farm land. 84% of the household's income was derived from on-farm activities and sales. The MRE household started growing teak trees, possibly to assert its long-term claim on its remaining parcels to avoid the further loss of farmland. The household head indicated to plan a stronger focus on livestock rearing to reduce his dependency on the shrinking farmlands for crop cultivation. In 2019, the MRE household grew P2 (cowpea) and implemented P4 (a rotation of maize with soybean and groundnuts) but was not aware of P7 (the feed and health package for small ruminants). We hypothesize that adopting P7 could, nevertheless, be interesting for the MRE household, since sheep and goats were indicated to be the main livestock assets and source of resilience for the household.Similar to the situation in 2015, the HRE household in 2019 was still heavily involved in both crop and livestock farming, by rearing cattle, and growing cash crops like groundnuts, rice and vegetables. The household started rearing guinea fowl and typically sold livestock in times of crop failure. The household also owned a tractor, a bore hole, a mill, a small supermarket in the community and other assets that they rented out or used to provide services. We estimate that in 2019 only about 30-40% of the HRE household's income was derived from farming. Concerning the technology packages, the eldest son of the HRE household indicated that they did not use the recommended fertilizer rate on maize (P1), since yields were sufficiently high at lower rates. The son further indicated not to be interested in P3 (soybean) since soybean, compared to other crops, was too labour intensive and the fields, where the household would need to plant it, were relatively far away. The strip crop (P5) was considered as too labour intensive, too. Only few farmers in Duko were reported to practice it.In 2015, the three case study farms had different starting positions in terms of their farm operating profit, labour and soil organic matter balances (Figure 4): per unit of area, according to FarmDESIGN, the MRE household had the lowest profit (229 GHS ha −1 yr −1 ), labour input (228 h ha −1 yr −1 ) and SOM balance (−802 kg ha −1 yr −1 ). The LRE household showed a greater profitability (318 GHS ha −1 yr −1 ) and labour input (335 h ha −1 yr −1 ) than the MRE farm and the least negative SOM balance (−372 kg ha −1 yr −1 ) among all three farms.When comparing the farm performances at shocked state relative to the baselines (Figure 5), the FarmDESIGN results suggested that the severe drought would have the most drastic impact for all three farms, causing the greatest reduction in SOM, but also the highest labour savings among the shocks. For all three farm types, the severe drought shock would, according to the model, lead to a negative operating profit (a negative profitability), so that all three farm households would have to use their savings or run side-businesses in a severe drought year. Modelled profits of the MRE (−166%) and HRE (−153%) farm were most impacted by drought, while the modelled profit of the LRE farm was most affected by the price shock (−126%), closely followed by the drought (−111%). According to FarmDESIGN, the labour shock severely impacted the MRE farm household, too, reducing its profits by 90%.Concerning the case study farmers' self-reported vulnerability in terms of profit cutbacks and resulting food insecurity, the respondents of all three case study farms evaluated the drought shock as the most severe. In line with the model results, the MRE household evaluated the labour shock as severe, too. In fact, according to the respondents of the LRE and MRE household, if labour falls short, due to illness, death or out-migration, farmers who do not manage to immediately mobilize compensatory labour, struggle to maintain their farm activities, leading to yield losses due to untimely weeding or harvesting. In case of illness, the burden was highest, since ill household members require the care, feeding and financial support of the remaining healthy household members. When asked which shock the respondents would address first if they were able to remove one of the four, both the LRE and MRE respondents pointed towards the labour (health) shock rather than the drought shock, possibly indicating a high importance of socio-emotional stability, too. Outmigration was reported to have the advantage that fewer people in the household need to be fed and that, at times, those who return from or remain in off-farm jobs, provide remittances that support the   (pre-shock, 2015) in terms of the operating profit (GHS per year (yr −1 ), per hectare (ha) or per person (pp)), the labour input in hours (h) and the soil organic matter (SOM) balance (kg ha −1 yr −1 ). For reference, 500 GHS correspond to 65 USD, 10.000 GHS to 1300 USD (1GHS = 0.13 USD, 18.05.2022).household. Concerning the changes in labour needs, all respondents indicated that yield reducing shocks would reduce labour demand, since they would weed less and harvest less. While the MRE and HRE respondents seemed unable to estimate overall labour savings, the LRE household head reported 30% lower labour needs in times of drought. However, the labour savings were overshadowed by the foregone food and profit, particularly since the redundant labour could not easily be turned towards a similarly productive alternative activity.Both model results (Figure 5) and farmers selfreports (Figure 6) indicated that the price shock would strongly decrease farm profits of the LRE and MRE households, while it would have no effect on the HRE farm. The different impacts of the price shock seemed to depend on whether a household was a net buyer or net seller of cheap maize: the HRE household reported having the capacity to buy cheap maize and later re-sell it for a higher price, making profit in times of the price shock. Farmers of all household types stated that the price shock would not have an impact on their food security. Both the whole-farm model results and the farmer self-reports indicate that the MRE farm household seemed to be the most vulnerable among the three farm types in terms of its operating profits, particularly in times of a severe drought, price or labour shock.Concerning the vulnerability of individual household members, a local extension officer hypothesized that the FAW infestation and consequent maize yield reductions would affect the male household heads most, since they were responsible for their household's food security, while women rather grew vegetables and groundnuts and young men typically farmed rice. The drought could particularly affect women too, since they were responsible for fetching water and water levels would temporarily be lower or nearby wells would be dry. This did not seem to be an issue for women in Duko, since there was a public water pump in the village centre resulting in good reach of water for all homesteads of the community.This section presents model-based results on the farms' room to manoeuvre after each shock as well as narratives on shock-specific coping strategies at individual and household-level, jointly reflecting potential recovery strategies per farm and farmer type.Comparing the rooms to manoeuvre after shock (Figures 7 and 8), we found that for all farms, the addition of project proposed technology packages (Table 1) would increase their capacity to recover or to improve their performance as compared to the respective baselines.The LRE farm household would only have a few options to change its farm configuration, but these few changes would make a big difference in the recovery from most shocks. The ability to recover from the drought and the price shock was high, even without the inclusion of the new technology packages, indicating a considerable buffer capacity (Figure 7). Adding P1 (maize, including green manure application) would significantly improve the soil organic matter balance, while labour savings and operating profits would only marginally increase as compared to the buffer capacity. Generally, the LRE farm's ability to recover its profitability would be limited, barely reaching or surpassing the original profitability at the baselines even when including P1. Only after the labour shock scenario, FarmDESIGN identified configurations that allowed a notable profit increase (+21%). There seemed to be no (immediate) financial recovery for the LRE farm household after the FAW infestation, due to the high infestation level for both, the traditional and the P1 maize, which strongly determined the farm's income.The MRE farm household would have a larger room to manoeuvre for its recovery than the LRE farm household. While the technology packages would add little to the MRE household's performance in terms of labour savings or the soil organic matter balance, they would substantially increase the farms' operating profit, especially after the FAW infestation (+122% compared to baseline) and after the price shock (+106%) (Figure 7). Concerning alterations in farm configurations after drought (Figure 8b), the main change when compared to the baseline was the reduction of total farmland, mainly by reducing fallow land as part of farmland from 5.6 ha to 0.89 ha on average. The number of local sheep and goats was also reduced from five sheep and four goats at baseline to an average of three each for the buffer and the adaptive capacity. Furthermore, we observed a decrease in maize area: on average −16% for the buffer and −10% for the adaptive capacity as compared to the baseline area of 1.9 ha. We also noticed an initial cut-back and then gradual increase in soybean (max: 19%, P3 max: 14% of total farm area) and cowpea areas (max: 8%, P2 max: 2% of total farm area) with increasing profits. After the drought shock the MRE farm household was not able to fully recover in terms of its operating profit: the best performing configuration in both, the buffer and the adaptive capacity, remained 17% under the profitability at the baseline. After the labour shock, the maximum profit attainable as part of the buffer capacity remained 25% below the baseline. However, including the technology packages (optionally P1, P2, P3, P4, P6 and/or P7) could lead to an increase in the attainable profit to 6% above the baseline.For the HRE farm household, all model-generated maximum values for all objectives and after all shock scenarios, for both the buffer and the adaptive capacity, would constitute an improvement in comparison to the pre-shock performance at baseline. Even for the worst shock, the severe drought, in which the HRE farm household would experience a strong drop in operating profits and its soil organic matter balance, the farm household would be able to recover and supersede the baseline performance in all objectives by about 30-40%, even without adding new technologies. For both MRE and HRE households, operating profit was the indicator with the greatest possible improvements when including the project proposed technology packages. The improvements in labour savings or soil organic matter were minimal when allowing the model to add the new technology packages (optionally P1, P2, P3, P4, P6 and/or P7). FarmDESIGN exploration results indicated that more area should be allocated to the traditional crops rather than the project proposed technology packages (Figure 8c). The only packages that were chosen for the HRE farm were P6 (groundnuts) and P7 livestock (particularly sheep). However, the maximum area that the model allocated to P6 was only 0.2 hectares (0.7% of the farm area). Furthermore, P7 sheep were only added after the defined maxima for traditional sheep and goats were reached, again indicating a greater preference for the traditional farm elements.In addition to modelling the buffer and adaptive capacities of the three case study households, we asked 22 farmers in Duko to describe their risk mitigation and coping strategies as part of their transformative capacity, illustrating a variety of preparatory measures and recovery trajectories for different local farms and farmers. Respondents reported that mainly the male household members relied heavily on livestock sales (n = 19/22) in years with low crop yields due to a drought or a crop pest. Depending on their resource endowment and financial need, farmers sold poultry, small ruminants or cattle. However, livestock mortality rates were high and animals often fell ill and died. Increasingly frequent, animals suffer from ingested plastic waste (Figure 9). Furthermore, livestock theft has become very common. Mostly at night, fowl, small ruminants or even cattle have been stolen, with all farm types being affected. The high mortality rates and theft make livestock rearing unprofitable. Nevertheless, farmers continue to buy, rear and sell animals, since livestock is also used for cultural purposes, religious ceremonies, gifts, as a savings account and in fact, as an insurance in times of shock. Survey respondents who thought that livestock were important for resilience (76%), estimated, on average, that improvements in animal feed, health, breed or a lower mortality rate could increase household-level resilience by +35% (s = 0.153). It was livestock sales, the ownership of assets and lands that made most men (n = 11/19, 58%) feel more resilient than other members of their household, indicating gendered resilience capacities and attributes.While livestock in Duko mostly belonged to the men, women reported to have other coping strategies to support their households in times of shock: they collected and processed shea nuts into shea butter, which they sold on local markets (Figure 10). They also collected the edible pods of the carob tree and processed it into a local specialty called dawadawa (Figure 11), that their household ate and sold. Women in Duko also bought, processed and re-sold rice (Figure 12). Since women in Duko are successful traders, they were able to lend money to their husbands for hiring labour, for agricultural (e.g. ploughing) services or for purchasing inputs. Women reported to insist on the repayments by their husbands, so they were not held back in their own business and duties. Of the male respondents 32% (n = 6/19) indicated to feel less resilient than their wives, due to their wife's strength and more stable income through trading. Both men and women reported to be members of money saving groups, so called susu-groups (from akan 'susu' = 'plan'): all members made weekly contributions of a few Ghana Cedis, subsequently entitling them to take out small loans. Particularly during and after shocks, susu-loans provided direly needed capital to maintain or re-start income-generating activities. Members of Susu-groups reported high repayment rates, but also that they feel constrained by the low total capital that they were able to raise. They indicated to feel that their farm and off-farm businesses could go much further if they had a link and access to larger and formal micro-finance institutions.In addition to the above-mentioned general diversification and coping strategies, farmers reported that the technology packages from development projects also helped them to be more resilient: the provided inputs as a result of Africa RISING project interventions (seeds, fertilizer) for one acre of maize (mentioned by 90% of responding project beneficiaries), and agronomic practices like row planting, the use of improved seeds, the choice of the right planting time, the use of compost and microdosing of fertilizer, were reported to increase yields, enabling farmers to build up a greater food and economic buffer, decreasing their vulnerability and allowing them to recover better and faster. On average, farmers reported an increase of +22% (s = 0.08) in their resilience due to the implementation of project proposed technology packages.Concerning shock-specific coping strategies, in times of drought, the chosen planting time (early or late) and soil properties (dry or wet) were indicated to co-determine the severity of the yield losses. The LRE case study household planted at multiple moments to ensure that at least one share of the crops would yield well regardless of the weather conditions. Planting different crop varieties, some more and some less drought tolerant, was a coping strategy by the MRE case study household, but in times of a severe drought, as we defined it, none of the crop varieties was indicated to perform well anymore. Relatively drought tolerant quality protein maize (QPM) varieties such as Omankwa (early duration with 90 maturity days) and Abontem (extra early duration with 75-80 maturity days) were reported to only perform better in times of moderate drought i.e. one week of no rainfall during the most vulnerable crop growth stages. For the drought shock, farmers thus mentioned preparatory measures rather than a particular strategy to cope with or to recovery from it.In times of a severe price shock, in general, the ability to store the grain and to sell it later, when prices would go up again, was identified as the main coping strategy, decreasing vulnerability.Concerning the FAW infestation, farmers reported that applying a chemical spray commonly known as Ema Star 112EC (active ingredient: Emamectin Benzoate + Acetamiprid, 1.3%) was their main coping strategy, making them less vulnerable: a development  project had taught farmers in Duko about the spray and how to apply it, significantly reducing FAWrelated maize yield losses (20-40% instead of 50-70%). The MRE household head reported to produce and apply a self-made neem-spray instead. When comparing the reported effectiveness of the chemical spray (20%-40% maize yield losses for the LRE and the HRE household) and the neem spray (60% maize yield losses for the MRE household), the chemical spray seemed to perform better. Weather conditions also played a role in determining the infestation levels (Du Plessis et al., 2020): in 2019, the FAW infestation was reported to be less severe with farmers hypothesizing that the lower infestation was associated to the strong rainfalls washing FAW-caterpillars off their host plants.In times of a labour shock, farmers reported that their social network was particularly important in order to mobilize communal labour i.e. people get together in groups and take turns working on each other's fields. Due to their small field sizes and their relatively greater subsistence orientation, the LRE farm household seemed to face the least problems in mobilizing communal labour, while the MRE and HRE farmers had to resort to hired labour, constituting a financial challenge for the MRE but not for the HRE farm household.Putting the coping strategies into a medium to long-term perspective, we asked farmers how willing they actually were to make changes to their farm systems in order to decrease their vulnerability or to increase their ability to recover. On average, farmers reported a low willingness to change: a mean value of 1.6 out of 10 (0 = nothing at all, 10 = radical changes). About half (48%) of the respondents indicated to not change anything, even in times of or after a major shock. Among those respondents who would make changes, most (55%) indicated to change the crop varieties to short-duration ones, to increase the crop diversity (45%) and/or to change the planting time (45%) or location (36%). To increase their resilience, farmers envisioned an increase rather than a change in their existing activities, e.g. to increase their herd size (n = 14/21) and to expand their agricultural area (n = 11/21). While an increase in farm area has indeed been reported by the LRE household (+80% between 2015 and 2019), the trajectory of the MRE case study household demonstrates the increasingly limited possibilities for an expansion of good quality agricultural land in the community. The eldest son of the HRE household mentioned a different strategy: his household could be more resilient if (more) of their members had stable off-farm incomes through jobs in the nearby cities of Tamale or Savelugu. Finally, we also inquired about the speed of recovery: the LRE household (head) indicated that it would take the household two years to recover from a severe drought, a severe price shock or a FAW infestation and one year to recover from the severe labour shock. The MRE household (head) estimated their recovery to take longer: four years to recover from the severe drought and two years from the severe price shock, the FAW infestation or the labour shock. The HRE household (eldest son) indicated that the household would already have recovered the year after any of the four shocks.The model results and farmer consultations jointly confirmed that all three farm types could become more resilient through the adoption of technology packages for sustainable intensification: by using good agronomic practices, farmers would be able to increase productivity which would allow them to build up a financial buffer, making them less vulnerable to shocks and empowering them to recover better and faster. While the LRE household's performance mainly improved in terms of its SOM balance, the MRE and HRE farms significantly improved their operating profits. The larger improvement in SOM for the LRE household through adoption of P1 maize, using crop residues as green manure, is ascribable to the high importance of crop-related soil fertility measures due to the absence of livestock (animal manure) (Michalscheck et al., 2018). The large potential profit gains for the MRE and HRE households were related to their larger range of choices among traditional and SI technology packages, implying a greater adaptability and transformability. A complementary study by Jansen (2020) showed that, for the same case study households, incorporating the technology packages was an attractive strategy to improve the households' nutritional resilience, too. Beyond farm activities within the project-proposed intervention focus (small ruminants, maize, legumes), farmers reported a broad range of additional coping strategies: men also reared poultry and cattle, depending on their resource endowment, while women collected and sold wild nuts and fruits and processed rice to generate an additional income. The same gendered economic activities have been reported in previous studies (Aniah et al., 2019;Apusigah, 2009;Assan et al., 2018;Kuivanen et al., 2016b;Mewes, 2018;Nyantakyi-Frimpong & Bezner Kerr, 2017). Particularly the collection of wild nuts and fruits has a positive side effect: it adds value to the renewable, nonwood products of local tree species, protecting e.g. shea trees (Vitellaria paradoxa, syn. Butyrospermum parkii, Butyrospermum paradoxum) from logging (Masters et al., 2004), despite a high local demand for firewood. Shea nut collection and processing does not only strengthen the resilience of women and their households, but also tests and revives the community cohesion, since the protection and the use of these trees requires a communal effort (Chen, 2017;Elias, 2015;Elias & Carney, 2007). Another coping strategy used by both men and women was the participation in money saving groups to steadily build up a small capital and to take out loans. According to Batung et al. (2022) access to credit services is indeed a decisive factor for smallholder farmers in Norther Ghana to build perceived (climate change) resilience. Furthermore, we found that good postharvest storage was particularly important in times of a crop price shock, allowing farmers to postpone sales in order to eventually achieve better market prices. A strong social network was considered important in times of a labour shock, allowing farmers to effectively mobilize compensatory labour from the community.Despite the positive outlook, all four shocks and in particular the drought were expected to severely impair the three case study farms. The severe drought would lead to negative operating profits, implying that farmers would have to live off their savings or side-businesses in a severe drought year. Studies by Tambo and Wünscher (2017) as well as Jarawura (2014) confirm that farmers in Northern Ghana are weakly resilient to climate shocks. Similar to our findings, Tambo and Wünscher (2017) further report that, beyond adopting externally driven technologies, farmers had developed their very own innovations and coping strategies, making innovators about 6% more resilient than non-innovators. Birthal and Hazrana (2019) refer to evidence from Nigeria and India, where many smallholders, particularly assetpoor farmers, despite various risk-coping mechanisms, were unable to recover after severe drought. Also in Duko, LRE and MRE households would be more affected than HRE farmers, struggling to recover after shocks. The LRE household would only have a very small room to manoeuvre and little options for change, barely able to re-attain its preshock profitability, particularly after the severe drought or the severe price shock. The MRE household would be vulnerable to the labour shock and the drought, anticipating to require the longest recovery time (of two to four years) among the three case study households. The high vulnerability and low capacity to recover might be a consequence of the MRE household trying to grow, to be more commercial, taking more risks than the LRE farm, without having the same fallback options as the HRE farm household with its off-farm side-businesses. At baseline, the MRE household had the lowest labour input and profit per hectare, possibly revealing a persistent labour constraint, which in turn might explain the severity of the labour shock to the MRE household.Despite the strong general alignment of our model results with farmer realities, we observed a disparity for the exploration of recovery options after drought for the MRE household: while the model recommended a strong reduction in fallow land area, the MRE household in 2019 was worried about exactly this reduction, since it was limiting the household's ability to rotate crops, constraining their possibilities and profitability of arable farming. So why did the model suggest this change? Firstly, the reduction of the unproductive fallow land saved an assumed general land costs of about 145 GHS ha −1 yr −1 (GARBES, 2014). Secondly, fallow land has a relatively low value for effective organic matter (500 kg ha −1 yr −1 as e.g. compared to 1025 kg ha −1 yr −1 for cowpea or 1285 kg ha −1 yr −1 for soybean) so that reducing its area would automatically increase the farm average SOM per hectare, which FarmDESIGN was to maximize. The settings of decision variables and constraints could be further tuned to reflect that the fallow lands were an important part of the crop rotations, solely allowing a replacement of fallow land with other crops. Our findings illustrate the importance of combining modelling-methods with direct farmer consultations to attain sensible and comprehensive insights (Kotu et al., 2022;Michalscheck et al., 2018;Nord et al., 2021;Shapiro-Garza et al., 2020).There were some limitations in this study. Firstly, we did not consult as many women as men and we did not systematically capture whether, and how, men, women or the youth were more or less vulnerable to the different shocks. Secondly, with our project-affiliation, we suspect a desirability bias in the farmer-reported appreciation of the technology packages reported in Section 4.3.2. Respondents might have felt obliged to show their gratefulness or the usefulness of project activities in order to please the project-affiliated researchers and to encourage the continuation of project activities. We noticed a strong appreciation of the material project benefits, since the project-related resilience-strengthening aspect most mentioned (n = 18/20) was the provision of inputs by the development project in the scope of their trials. While the ongoing provision of inputs, even just for a small plot of land per household, is a proof of the support and commitment by the project to the farmers, the continued subsidization hindered the observation of actual technology adoption among project beneficiaries. Moreover, especially in the Northern Region of Ghana, many NGOs and projects have been, and continue to be, active, providing agricultural inputs and trainings in a rather un-coordinated manner (Adom, 2015) to the point that farmers are not always able to clearly differentiate who provided what support and with which purpose. In this context, despite making abstract concepts as tangible as possible, it might have been difficult for farmers to truly disentangle the complexity of influences shaping their resilience. However, since our model-based exploration of vulnerability, buffer and adaptive capacity per farm type is based on a careful and conservative triangulation of actual trial data (yields, SOM), technical reports, expert consultations and in-depth interviews with our case study farmers (labour), we judge our modelbased results on vulnerability and recovery as solid. Also, the gendered coping strategies were largely unrelated to project activities and unbiased by our project affiliation.Concerning the transferability of our findings to other smallholder communities in Northern Ghana, we observed differences with other areas within the region: in Nyangua (Upper East Region) for instance, farmers reported that their extensive irrigated dry season gardens and their frequent trade with merchants from Burkina Faso with both agricultural and non-agricultural products, allowed most farmers in the community to generate enough additional income to recover from any shock within one year. For the Upper West Region, Assan et al. (2018) report that a temporary southward migration for labour was a crucial coping strategy of local smallholder farmers in response to dry spells and droughts. In principle, however, we expect similarities, for instance in that LRE households generally evince a relatively small room to manoeuvre with less options to recover than MRE and HRE households (Michalscheck et al., 2018). We also expect HRE households in general to have a large portfolio of agricultural and non-agricultural activities and assets, making them most resilient among the farm types and able to recover quickly after shocks. While our survey results from Duko largely reflect the male perspective and might thus be biased, livestock rearing and sales also stood out as the main coping strategies in times of shock during the Focus Group Discussions that we facilitated in Nyangua (Upper East Region) and Zanko (Upper West Region). Due to the high mortality and theft, investing into livestock seemed to be an effective but expensive insurance for farm households in Northern Ghana. The importance of livestock in times of shock has been reported for smallholder farm systems all over Africa (Acosta et al., 2021), including Kenya (Ng'ang'a et al., 2016;Nyberg et al., 2021;Tittonell, 2014), Zimbabwe (Mutenje et al., 2008), Madagascar (Hänke & Barkmann, 2017), Ethiopia (Tessema & Simane, 2019) and Egypt (Alary et al., 2014). It is important to recognize that farmers have developed their own, often innovative coping mechanisms ranging from an innovative sourcing of poultry feed by trapping termites (Nyangua) to the collection, consumption and sale of a great diversity of wild plants, nuts and fruitsa portfolio of promising ideas and competencies that should not be discounted and are worth further study.A challenge at community-and possibly at regional-level seems to be, that many farmers aim to be more resilient by doing 'more of the same' by increasing their herd size and expanding their farm land, despite livestock rearing being highly resource consuming (feed, land, labour), frequently unprofitable due to high mortality rates and theft (Amankwah et al., 2012;Kuivanen et al., 2016a) and land becoming increasingly scarce. Similar to descriptions of Hertel et al. (2014), in this context we observe that technologies and techniques that increase the profitability of livestock rearing and crop cultivation, seem to fuel rather than to attenuate the farmers' interest in growing and expanding. In energy economics, it is well studied how efficiency gains through new technologies can be offset by triggering additional demands (Fernández García et al., 2014;Freire-González, 2011;Toroghi & Oliver, 2019;Vélez-Henao et al., 2020) also denoted as the rebound effect. In the agricultural sciences, we speak of the Jevon's paradox (Jevons, 1866) when intensification intended to reduce pressure on natural resources, such as surrounding lands and forests, has the opposite effect of increased use and degradation of these resources. This phenomenon is well documented for various agroecosystems (Ceddia & Zepharovich, 2017;Ngoma et al., 2021), for water use under efficient irrigation schemes (Sears et al., 2018;Wang et al., 2020) and for energy efficiency actions (Cansino et al., 2019;Sorrell, 2009). We propose that future research gathers further evidence on the community-and landscape-level effects of agricultural intensification (Adhikari et al., 2018), including an analysis on how agricultural expansion versus land sparing impacts ecosystem services and, finally, resilience at farmhousehold level. Examining how higher-level dynamics support or undermine household-level resilience could provide important additional insights into how smallholder can best prepare for, cope with or recover from shocks.The livelihoods of smallholder farmers in Northern Ghana are resource intensive and highly coupled with their land assets as their main natural resource base. However, an intensification of resource use at individual or household-level is likely to increase the community-and landscape level pressure on local resources. New questions arise concerning the carrying capacity of local ecosystems and the perspective of sustainable arable farming under scenarios of increasing land scarcity. One way to increase outputs per unit of input is to reduce losses. Preventing post-harvest losses can make a positive difference to farmers' food security and incomes as well as buffer price shocks (Teferra, 2022;Xue et al., 2021). Another loss are preventable constraints on farmers health (Garcia et al., 2020), since their health determines the availability of labour for timely crop cultivation and harvesting, being fundamental to sustain productive farm systems. We conclude that, depending on their resource endowment, their gender and their social network, farmers in Northern Ghana were differently vulnerable and had different coping strategies for shocks such as a severe drought, pest, labour or economic shock. A greater awareness of farm and farmer diversity in terms of livelihoods, challenges and coping strategies, enables improved support for farmers to build more productive, sustainable and resilient farm systems and livelihoods.grateful to have had the support of Roger Awpone and in the Upper West of Rufus Tampuori. I would also like to thank Dorien Jansen for her company during the field work and her complementary work on nutrition.No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).","tokenCount":"10260"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"8a8c3b6f3f8523b879eec4e4e40173ed","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/ec57df00-8bf9-4c25-8aad-197d492ab758/retrieve","id":"-1600843725"},"keywords":["Kersting's groundnut","Management practices","Storage constraints","Insect pests","Varietal resistance"],"sieverID":"61d793e9-d574-4932-846d-73402bdf82d0","pagecount":"11","content":"Background: Macrotyloma geocarpum Harms is a neglected and underutilized crop in Benin subject to several constraints including storage insect attacks, which contribute to the decrease in its production. An ethnobotanical survey using a semi-structured questionnaire was conducted in 15 villages in southern and central Benin to document farmers' perceptions of M. geocarpum storage insect pests and their traditional management practices. Results: The results showed that insect pest were the most important storage constraint of M. geocarpum. To overcome this constraint, the promotion of resistant landraces has been proposed by farmers. Six vernaculars names of storage insect pests of M. geocarpum were identified throughout the study area and all corresponding to Callosobruchus maculatus (F.) which proved to be the most abundant insect in the stocks. Palatability and fragility of seeds coat have been identified by farmers as the main factors favoring the infestation by this pest. Various storage containers of M. geocarpum have been inventoried. Our study revealed that education, storage containers, and Kersting's groundnut landraces significantly influenced farmers' perceptions of severity of insect pest damages. The use of chemicals and repellent plants were the main control methods used by farmers to protect stocks. Different levels of resistance of M. geocarpum landraces to storage insect pests were reported. Conclusions: This study provides baseline information for development of integrated management approaches against storage insect pests of M. geocarpum. The perceived level of resistance to insect damage on Kersting's groundnut landraces needs to be investigated.Macrotyloma geocarpum (Harms), or Kersting's groundnut, is an important African indigenous legume crop of the Fabaceae family grown on a small scale in West Africa for its grains are produced in pods developing below ground (Pasquet, Mergeai, & Baudoin, 2002). Identified as a neglected and underutilized species in Benin (Dansi et al., 2012), Kersting's groundnut is native to and mainly grown in West Africa (Hepper, 1963). In Benin, the seeds of M. geocarpum are particularly preferred over other grain legumes because of their high palatability (Achigan-Dako & Vodouhè, 2006;Assogba et al., 2015). Its edible seeds are high in proteins, carbohydrates, and essential amino acids (Chickwendu, 2007). They are also a good source of minerals such as phosphorus, potassium, calcium, and sodium (Oyetayo & Ajayi, 2005). According to Ajayi and Oyetayo (2009), Kersting's groundnut can be used in the formulation of dietary supplements for children and thus help to combat malnutrition. Moreover, it is an important source of income (2 to 6 USD per kilogram) for the rural population of Benin (Assogba et al., 2015).Unfortunately, M. geocarpum is on the verge to be abandoned in several countries including Benin (Assogba et al., 2015), mainly because of its poor storage capacity of seeds (Kouelo et al., 2012). In fact, a major constraint faced by farmers in post-harvest is pest attack during storage (Assogba et al., 2015;Ayenan & Ezin, 2016). However, very little attention has been given to the constraints related to the storage of M. geocarpum seeds in Benin. Although Achigan-Dako and Vodouhè (2006) notified that stored seeds are very susceptible to weevils and bruchids infestations, the diversity of insect pest species associated to stored seeds of M. geocarpum in the production areas is still unknown, and the perception of farmers about the extent of damage caused by these pests has never been evaluated. In addition, traditional management practices used to prevent or control insect infestations have been very scarce, whereas this knowledge is needed for the development of effective integrated pest management approaches adapted to the needs of local farmers (Norton, Rajotte, & Gapud, 1999;Van Huis & Meerman, 1997). In this context, farmers' perceptions of storage insect pest management are key elements for the design of efficient and easily implementable control practices (Okonya, Mwanga, Syndikus, & Kroschel, 2014).The resistant varieties are a most economical and healthy way to minimize loss due to attack of storage insects (Badii, Asante, & Bayorbor, 2011). However, in Benin, resistance of Kersting's groundnut landraces to storage insects and the reasons of the observed susceptibility have never been investigated. We report in this paper the findings of a study carried out in Benin in order to (1) identify Kersting's groundnut storage constraints and solutions proposed by farmers to overcome these constraints, (2) evaluate farmers' knowledge and perceptions of its storage pests, (3) examine farmers' current practices in managing its storage pests, and (4) identify landraces that have some resistance to damage by storage insect pests.The present study was conducted in southern and central Benin which are the major production area of M. geocarpum (Assogba et al., 2015, Kouelo et al., 2012, Worou, Zandjanakou-Tachin, Boulga, & Bokonon-Ganta, 2016). The south and the centre are relatively humid agro-ecological zones with bimodal rainy seasons and mean annual rainfall varying from 1.100 to 1.400 mm/year (Yabi & Afouda, 2012). Mean annual temperatures range from 26 to 28 °C (Adam & Boko, 1993). Vegetation types are semi-deciduous forest (south), woodland and savannah (center east), and dry semideciduous forest (center west and south). The main ethnic groups are Adja, Cotafon, Holly, Ouéménou, Pédah, Saxwé, Tori, Watchi, Xwla, Yoruba, Fon, Mahi, Idaasha, Fé, and Tchabé (Adam & Boko, 1993). Ethnobotanical survey was conducted in 15 villages selected in southern and central Benin (Fig. 1) based on the literature review, their accessibility and discussions with farmers and extension agricultural services locally named CARDER (regional action centres for rural development).A survey was implemented to collect data using participatory research appraisal tools and techniques, such as direct observation, individual interviews, and field visits, using a pre-established questionnaire following Orobiyi et al. (2013). The surveyed farmers in each village were selected with the assistance of the chiefs of the village but also by the \"snowball\" sampling method. This is a chain-sampling method that relies on the recommendations of the starting subjects to reach additional participants (Johnston & Sabin, 2010). A total of 83 producers of M. geocarpum were surveyed throughout the study area. The data collected focused on the sociodemographic characteristics of the interviewees (sex, age, education, years of experience in the cultivation of Kersting's groundnut, area sown), the constraints related to the storage of Kersting's groundnut seeds, the periods of infestation, farmers perception of insect pests of stored Kersting's groundnut seeds, storage containers, shelf life, severity of insect pest attack, susceptibility, and resistance of Kersting's groundnut landraces to storage insects and management practices of insects in Kersting's groundnut stocks. The perception on the storage insect severity was captured as a categorical variable using a 4-point Likert scale rating (Khan et al., 2014).Farmers were asked to score for the level of damage caused by insect pests (Munyuli et al., 2017). A fourpoint scale (0 = no severe, 1 = moderate severity, 2 = severe, and 3 = very severe) was used for rating the damage level perceived. Insects identified by farmers as storage pests of M. geocarpum were collected and stored in labelled boxes (village, storage container, vernacular name) containing alcohol at 70 °C, for later identification in the laboratory. Similarly, plant samples used by farmers to control storage insects were collected and tagged (vernacular name of the plant, village name, and method of use) and returned to the laboratory for identification.In each prospected village, 300 g of infested Kersting's groundnut seeds was weighed using an electronic scale and collected from different storage containers from three households. The plastic boxes (17 cm in height, 6 cm in diameter) containing the samples of infested Kersting's groundnut seeds were labelled (name of the landrace, storage form (seed or pod), storage containers and the name of the village) and incubated for 3 months under laboratory conditions (25 ± 2 °C, 70 ± 5% of relative humidity, and a photoperiod of 12:12 (L:D) h), following Eze, Asiegbu, Mbah, Orkwor, and Asiedu (2006) and Loko et al. (2013). After the incubation period, the samples were sieved using a sieve with a mesh of 0.25 mm. The collected insects were counted and put in vials containing alcohol at 70°for their conservation. Species' identification was done at the Laboratory of Applied Entomology of the Faculty of Sciences and Technology of Dassa-Zoumé. The determination of insect species was based on the use of Coleoptera identification keys of stored commodities Delobel and Tran (1993), Haines (1989), andHalstead (1986). The ethnobotanical data were analysed using the descriptive statistics, and the results were presented in the form of tables and graphs constructed with Excel software (Microsoft office 2016). We used an ordinal regression with a logit link (ordered logit) to explain the association between severity levels of storage insect attacks (no severe, moderate severity, severe, and very severe) and socio-demographic characteristics of surveyed farmers (age, gender, size of household, farming experience, land size, level of education), storage containers (canaries, jute bags, calabash, insecticide boxes, basin, jar, plastic buckets), and Kersting's groundnut landraces (Doyi wéwé, Doyi vovo, Doyi wiwi) using R software (Midega, Murage, Pittchar, & Khan, 2016). However, for ease of interpretation of results, marginal effects were also estimated using R software (Greene, 2003;Midega et al., 2012).A total of 83 producers of M. geocarpum were surveyed, among them 71.1% were men and 28.9% are women. They belonged to 5 socio-cultural groups including Mahi (51.8%), Fon (39.8%), Idaatcha (4.8%), Nago (2.4%), and Tchabé (1.2%). Their age ranged from 21 to 70 years with an average of 45 years and the age group 37-53 was instead of the most represented (Table 1). Household size ranged from 3 to 22 individuals with an average of 6 individuals. The majority of surveyed farmers (68.7%) were illiterate, while 15.6% had primary level, 12.1% secondary level, and only 3.6% had tertiary. The surveyed farmers had an experience ranging from 2 to 48 years in the production of Kersting's groundnut with an average experience of 12 years. Kersting's groundnuts were cultivated on small plots (0.1-1 ha) by most farmers (54.2%). Four seeds storage constraints were in the study area. Among them, the most important is the attack of insects (83.6% of responses), followed by the long duration of seeds drying (11.4% of responses).The loss of seeds stored germination (2.5% of responses) and the lack of good storage containers (2.5% of responses) were of minor importance. This trend was observed throughout south and central Benin (Table 2). Only a few interviewees reported that the losses caused by storage insects were severe (15.7% of farmers) or very severe (13.3% of farmers), while most farmers (51.8%) estimated that losses related to insect pest attacks are moderately severe. However, some farmers (19.2%) believe that storage insects do not cause any losses. For most farmers (57.6%), infestations of Kersting's groundnut by insects occur mainly between the sixth and seventh months of storage (Fig. 2). To minimize Kersting's groundnut seeds storage constraints, the farmers proposed six key solutions. Among them, the promotion of Kersting's groundnut varieties resistant to insect pests (25.6% of responses), the use of more efficient storage containers (25.6% of responses), and the assistance of CARDER agents in the conservation of Kersting's groundnut seeds (20.9% of responses) were the most commonly. of responses), and high temperature inside the storage system (6.5% of responses) were the most important factors (Fig. 3).The diversity analysis conducted on a total of 50 insect samples taken from the stocks revealed three species of insect pests associated with Kersting's groundnut seed. These are C. maculatus (in stored Doyi wéwé, Doyi wiwi,   N number of interviewed household heads Doyi vovo landraces), Acanthoscelides obtectus Say (Coleoptera: Bruchidae), and Lasioderma serricorne (F) (Cole-Anobiidae) (in stored Doyi wéwé landrace). Among insects, C. maculatus was found in 82% of the samples collected and was also the most abundant (96.9%) in all the samples in which it was found.Storage containers varied from one farmer to another and depending on the amount of stored Kersting's groundnut, with plastic buckets (61.5% of responses) and jute bags (16.9%) being most common. Clay pots (7.2%), insecticides boxes (6%), basin (4.8%), jar (2.4%), and calabash (1.2%) were also used as storage tools by farmers. In most of cases, only a small amount of Kersting's groundnut is stored as seed. Most of the harvested Kersting's groundnut was sold just after harvest (1 to 3 months) to avoid storage losses. Farmers estimate that Kersting's groundnut seeds can be stored for to 6 to 8 months (79.5% of responses) and 9 to 12 months (15.7% of responses) with no loss due to storage insect attack. Some farmers estimate that damage of insect can be observed in Kersting's groundnut seeds only after 1 to 2 months (2.4% of farmers) and 3 to 5 months (2.4% of farmers) of storage. Highly infested Kersting's groundnut seeds are discarded by many of surveyed farmers (44.6%). However, some farmers reported consuming (21.7%) and making donuts and cakes for sale (22.9%) with heavily infested seeds. Only 8.4% and 1.2% of the respondents used the infested seeds as animal feed and as planting materials.Farmers' perception of the susceptibility of Kersting's groundnut landraces to storage insect pests Throughout the study area, three Kersting's groundnut landraces were grown by farmers. Most farmers (72.3%) noted differences in susceptibility of landraces to insect pests. Among them, landrace Doyi wéwé with white tegument, which is the most cultivated, is also the most susceptible to storage insect pests according to the majority of farmers (91.7%). On the other hand, Doyi vovo with red tegument and Doyi wiwi with black tegument were cited as susceptible to storage insects only by 1.7% 6.6% of farmers, respectively. Several reasons were given to explain the susceptibility of Doyi wéwé: palatability of seeds (53.2% of responses), high soil moisture (27.7% of responses), thinness of the seed coat (14.9% of responses), late harvest (2.1% of responses), and high water content of seeds (2.1% of responses). Most farmers (90.4%) did not identify any Kersting's groundnut landraces as resistant to storage insects. Only a few farmers reported Doyi vovo (3.6%) and Doyi wiwi (6%) as storage insect-resistant landraces. For these farmers, the resistance of the Doyi vovo and Doyi wiwi landraces could be explained by the hardness of their seed coat but also by their non-palatable nature.The model of the ordered probit regression was significant at 1%. The results showed that education, type of storage containers, and type of Kersting's groundnut landraces produced had a statistically significant relationship with farmers' perception of severity of storage insect damage (Table 3). Farmers who have university education level (coefficient 2.091) and those who produced Doyi vovo (coefficient 2.044) and Doyi wiwi (coefficient 1.711) landraces had positive and significant effect on farmers' knowledge of severity of storage insect attack. The marginal effects for university education and the type of cultivated landraces were significant for severe rank implying that this category of farmers was most likely to rank the attack as severe. Farmers who store Kersting's groundnut grains in jute bags perceived the pest attack as 'not severe' (coefficient − 1.740). The corresponding significant marginal effects for storage in jute bags were − 0.154 (for \"not severe\" rank), − 0.121 (for \"severe\" rank), and − 0.086 (for \"very severe\" rank). The variables such as age, sex, size of household, and farming experience showed trends to having a positive effect on the level of farmers' perception of severity of storage insect damage, but they were not statistically significant.To limit caused by insects on stored Kersting's groundnut grains, most farmers (83.1%) implemented control methods. Under traditional storage conditions, farmers enumerated seven approaches to control storage insect pests. Among them, the use of chemicals (33.3% of responses) and the use of insect repellent plants (30.4% of responses) were the most important. Lamp kerosene (11.6% of responses), ash (10.2% of responses), and sand (8.7% of responses) were also used by some farmers. Other strategies such as sun exposure of M. geocarpum grains (4.4% of responses) and the use of ox droppings (1.4% of responses) were not widely used.Among the chemical pesticides, farmers listed three insecticides and an herbicide (Table 4). These included the herbicide Glyphader 480 and insecticides to protect cotton (KD plus 415), horticultural crops (LAMBDA Super 2.5 EC), and stored commodities (Sofagrain). is bought at the open market while the other chemicals are obtained from the extension offices of CARDER in their locality. The patterns of use varied depending on the type of chemical used (Table 4). Four plant species listed as repellents included Azadirachta indica A. Juss, Capsicum frutescens L., Citrus sinensis L., and Hyptis suaveolens (L.) Poit. The leaves (A. indica and H. suaveolens) and fruits (C. frutescens and C. sinensis) of these plants are the main organs used by farmers.Our results show that insect attack remains the most important constraint related to the storage of Kersting's groundnut seeds in central and southern Benin, which corroborates previous observations by Assogba et al. (2015). Generally, insect attack remains the main constraint of many stored seed legumes in the tropics (Gbaguidi et al., 2015;Worou et al., 2016), with losses up to 70% (Guèye, Seck, Wathelet, & Lognay, 2011;Ngamo & Hance, 2007). Among the control approaches proposed by farmers, the promotion of Kersting's groundnut varieties resistant to insect pests was the most important.Indeed, genetic control using tolerant or resistant landraces can be the most practical, economically less expensive, and environmentally friendly way of minimizing the effects of biotic stresses such as insects (Frison, Cherfas, & Hodgkin, 2011;Mercer & Perales, 2010). As was the case with voandzou and cowpea farmers in Benin (Gbaguidi et al., 2015), there was a call for breeders to develop new varieties that are insect tolerant and which respond to socioeconomic desire of producers and consumers. However, Kersting's groundnut being a neglected crop, a renewed effort must be sought to assure the needed attention to these farmer requirements for more resistant landraces. This study revealed that C. maculatus is the main pest of stored Kersting's groundnut seeds, confirming the results of Badii et al. (2011) in Ghana. This pest is polyphagous, which explains its presence in most agricultural settings, and hence, the ability to cause substantial damage the stocks of M. geocarpum. C. maculatus is also a major cowpea (Vigna unguiculata Walp), and Bambara groundnut (Voandzeia subterranea (L.) Thouars) storage insect in West Africa (Ajayi & Lale, 2001;Appleby & Credland, 2003). Because C. maculatus prevents farmers from preserving their seeds for a long time without losses, they usually sell off part of Kersting's groundnut produce immediately after harvest, at a much reduced price (Ayenan & Ezin, 2016). The higher abundance of C. maculatus in the stocks could explain the fact that this species was the only one out of the three present in stored Kersting's groundnut seeds to be recognized by farmers. Farmers have indicated that the palatability of Kersting's groundnut grains and the fragility of their seed coat favor the attacks of insect pests in stocks. In fact, some studies shown that high sugar content (Kosini, Saidou, & Nukenine, 2017;Podoler & Applebaum, 1971) and low thick seed coat (Desroches, El Shazly, Mandon, Duc, & Huignard, 1995;Janzen, 1977;Souza et al., 2011) allow rapid bruchid penetration. It is therefore important for breeders to consider farmers perception on the factors favoring the attack of Kersting's groundnut seeds by insects in the establishment of their varietal improvement program for the benefits of farmers and consumers. Various storage containers are used by farmers post-harvest conservation of Kersting's groundnut seeds. These results are consistent those of Achigan-Dako and Vodouhè (2006) and Assogba et al. (2015). In alignment with previous report of Assogba et al. (2015), farmers indicated that shelf life of Kersting's groundnut seeds varies from 1 to 12 months depending on the product used for preservation. Heavily infested kersting's groundnut grains are consumed by the interviewed farmers. However, there are reports of a strong relation between insect infestation and aflatoxins contamination in some pulses such as horsegram (Reddy, Brijitha, & Raghavender, 2005), grass pea (Reddy & Nusrath, 1983), cowpea, and pigeon pea (Matumba et al., 2017) which are poisonous and contribute to the genesis of primary liver cancer in Africa (Koshio et al., 2017;Peers, Gilman, & Linsell, 1976). It is therefore urgent to assess the presence of mycotoxins in Kersting's groundnut seeds heavily infested with insects and to raise farmers' awareness on the harmful effects of mycotoxins on human health.The results indicated that farmers who have university education ranked the severity of insect damage as very severe. A similar result was observed with Midega et al. ( 2016) which shows the positive influence of level of education on farmers' perception of storage pests of maize in western Kenya. Similar to the result of Midega et al. (2016), the types of storage containers determined the perception of severity of pest attack by farmers. Although the proportion of respondents who stored Kersting's groundnut seeds in jute bags was low, they perceived the pest attack as \"not severe.\" This perception is probably due to the fact that jute bags reduce infestation from one bag to the next by restricting entry or exit of bruchid adults (Lynch, Ouedrago, & Dicko, 1985). However, some studies shown that stored pulses in jute bags such as cowpea (Arogba, Ugwu, & Abu, 1998), pigeon pea (Vales, Ranga, Sudini, Patil, & Murdock, 2014), and mung bean (Mutungi, Affognon, Njoroge, Baributsa, & Murdock, 2014) were heavily infested with insects. It is so important to evaluate the impact of jute bag on Kersting's groundnut infestation by bruchids. Among the predictors of farmers' perceptions on the severity of storage insect pest attacks, farmers which cultivate Doyi vovo and Doyi wiwi landraces perceived the pest attack as severe. This is surprising because Kersting's groundnut with red and black tegument are known to be resistant to C. maculatus attacks (Badii et al., 2011). In addition, famers identified that Doyi wéwé was the most susceptible landrace to storage insect pests, while Doyi vovo and Doyi wiwi were the most resistant landraces. This perceived level of resistance to insect damages on stored Kersting's groundnut landraces needs to be investigated.For the control of insect pests in stored M. geocarpum, some farmers use chemicals intended for the protection of cotton and vegetable crops and even herbicides. This dangerous use of non-recommended insecticides and herbicides could have serious consequences for human health and the environment. In fact, most illiterate farmers misuse these chemicals, which lead to cases of intoxication (Ayelo et al., 2015;Ngamo & Hance, 2007). The sensitization of farmers on the environmental and health risks of pesticides by agents of CARDER which sell pesticide to farmers is imperative. Another negative effect of misuse of pesticides by farmers is the development of insect resistance (Bell & Wilson, 1995) and the resurgence of highly devastating pests (Bottrell & Schoenly, 2012). There is therefore a need to develop an alternative control method against insect pests of stored Kersting's groundnut seeds.For the protection of stored Kersting's groundnut seeds, repellent plants are used by some farmers in the study area. The repellency and insecticidal effects of A. indica (Azeez & Pitan, 2015;Lale & Abdulrahman, 1999;Tofel, Kosma, Stähler, Adler, & Nukenine, 2017), H. suaveolens (Azeez & Pitan, 2015;Sainey, 2016), C. frutescens (Echezona, 2006;Onu & Aliyu, 1995), and C. sinensis (Dutra, de Oliveira, Navarro, Barbosa, & Santos, 2016;Oboh et al., 2017) has already been scientifically proven by several studies for the control of C. maculatus. Therefore, the use of these plants for the protection of stored products by farmers is to be encouraged. Farmers indicated that they also used some inert products such as kerosene, ash, and sand for the management of insect pests in stored Kersting's groundnut grains, which substantiates previous finding of Assogba et al. (2015). However, all methods used by farmers for pest control are often time-limited and only apply to reduced quantities of seeds. For this, resistant or tolerant varieties of M. geocarpum to attack C. maculatus should be developed for sustainable control of the pest.Farmers considered insect pests to be the most important constraint to Kersting's groundnut seeds storage in Benin and proposed the promotion of resistant varieties to overcome this constraint. C. maculatus which is locally designated by six vernacular names was regarded as the main pest of stored Kersting's groundnut seeds. Several factors favoring the attack of Kersting's groundnut seeds by insects have been identified by farmers and need to be considered by the breeders in the establishment of their varietal improvement programs. Various storage containers of Kersting's groundnut seeds have been listed, and their effect on severity of bruchids damage must be evaluated. Farmers' perceptions of verity of insect pest damages were significantly influenced by of education, storage containers, and the type of Kersting's groundnut landraces cultivated. It is hence important to educate farmers about Kersting's groundnut storage insect pests and their damage. Farmers make efforts to control storage insect pest with traditional and chemical methods. Among the three Kersting's groundnut landraces cultivated in Benin, Doyi wéwé was considered by farmers as the most susceptible landrace to storage insect pests, while Doyi vovo and Doyi wiwi as the most resistant landraces. There is therefore a need to confirm these famers' perceptions by the assessment of susceptibility of these landraces to C. maculatus.","tokenCount":"4146"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"1e53ff83caf5956ab8f71f22c252f601","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/db1cb232-e789-4cf7-b51d-2aa4e6da0272/retrieve","id":"986426956"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"729bc103-2e87-4592-a941-3cf8e809a694","pagecount":"12","content":"There are 223 million unemployed or underemployed youth in developing and emerging economies (ILO, 2017). Wage earning opportunities are few -for instance, Africa creates only about 3 million formal jobs per year (Alam, 2019). Young people lack opportunities for income generation, especially in rural areas. Society, as a whole, stands to benefit by investing in young people, their ideas and innovations, to help shape the the agrifood system of tomorrow (FAO and AUC, 2022). Policymakers and programme implementers have developed a strong interest in promoting entrepreneurship for expanding employment, especially in rural areas and the agricultural sector where many unemployed youth can be found. Evidence is emerging that initiatives to promote agripreneurship are improving business practices, revenue and livelihoods of young people (Alam, 2019).This brief defines youth agripreneurship and explains its importance. It provides a framework for developing youth agripreneurship, the types of human capital needed for equipping youth for agripreneurship and ways of developing these types. Finally, the brief presents factors that policymakers and programme implementers need to consider when evaluating how to invest in youth agripreneurship.Why is youth agripreneurship important for improving livelihoods?Using the United Nations' definition (ages 15-24),¹ young people make up 16 percent of the world's population (United Nations, 2018); in some parts of the world, however, up to half the population is under the age of 25, e.g. sub-Saharan Africa (Filmer et al., 2014). Globally, the proportion of youth who are not in employment, education or training (NEET) increased from 21.7 percent of youth in 2015 to 22.4 percent in 2020. The number of NEET youth in Africa increased by 7.7 million (CGD, 2020). Policymakers in the Global South promote entrepreneurship as an avenue for increasing youth employment as an engine of growth and job creation as well as to improve livelihoods for the youth themselves (Alam, 2019).Agriculture-led growth has a high potential for reducing poverty levels (World Bank, 2007;Christiaensen and Martin, 2018). This bodes well for rural youth in the South, but they cannot always take advantage of opportunities in agriculture because:• Educational levels are low. For instance, in Africa, about one-third of youth between the ages of 12 and 14 are not in school (UNESCO UIS, 2020).• Youth often lack assets such as land and cash.• Ageism, prejudice based on age, can affect youth; in some places, youth face social barriers such as lack of trust by elders (Huber, 2020).• Youth perceptions may be negatively biased against agriculture.• Youth who are also poor, female or disabled face even greater constraints.Developing entrepreneurial abilities is often assumed to lead directly to more job creation and poverty reduction. For ins tance, researchers found that the ver y poor in Bangladesh move from labourers into entrepreneurs by providing them with assets and training to run a small business, with positive impact on their welfare (Bandiera et al., 2012). But other studies show that the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development is often complex and nuanced (Valerio et al. 2014). For example, the bulk of job creation resulting from entrepreneurship training is in the informal sector, where failure rates are high (World Bank, 2012). Moreover, innovation (new or improved products, processes or ideas) is not necessarily correlated with firm size; large firms are sometimes more innovative than small firms because of their greater access to information and finance. In other instances, micro-enterprises may be more innovative because they are more agile and have simpler decision-making procedures. For example, an owner/operator of a small business can make her own decisions regarding product design, whereas a manager in a larger firm may have to consult many other persons and structures (Valerio et al., 2014). Engaging youth in agripreneurship is complex, partly due to local context, e.g. the different socioeconomic and geographical factors that influence performance of entrepreneurial activities. Performance is evaluated across a range of criteria important to planners, governments and beneficiaries; it can include the ability of youth to manage enterprises profitably and sustainably, return on investment, contributions to income, employment and inclusion of marginalized groups such as women.Agricultural human capital is defined as the habits, skills, abilities, knowledge, social and personal attributes such as creativity, and experience embodied in people that allows them to conduct agricultural activities productively and sustainably (Goldin, 2014). Entrepreneurship, the process of setting up a business and taking on financial risks, is an important element of human capital because it equips the user with transferable skills, provides options for the user beyond the formal job market and has potential to foster economic growth. Entrepreneurship also includes less measurable elements such as personality traits, skills and behaviours associated with success in business (Alam, 2019). Three abilities are important in entrepreneurship: bearing uncertainty and risk, managing competently and identifying and exploiting opportunities (Kruger, 2004). Entrepreneurship can involve self-employment, new business activities, or managing businesses for others.Entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary field drawing upon business administration, economics and psychology (Baron, 2007). There are differences between the art of entrepreneurship (e.g. creativity, risk-taking, determination) and the science of entrepreneurship (e.g. planning, accounting, marketing) (Valerio et al., 2014). Both sets of skills are important. When we talk about agripreneurship, we are referring to any entrepreneurial activity involving agriculture -not only production but also things such as advisory services, input supply, transportation, marketing or processing.Youth agripreneurship is defined as the process of young people setting up businesses involving agriculture and the habits, skills, abilities, knowledge, social and personal attributes that young people need to conduct agricultural activities productively and sustainably.Performance is likely to vary across different enterprise and market types and across products of different value. It may be impacted by factors such as availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as smartphones and internet, by government policies affecting starting a business, or environmental hazards such as drought. Performance also depends on incentives driving the private and public sector to engage youth, such as subsidized internship programs, and incentives for youth to participate, such as access to credit.The need to define and differentiate among youth population segments is critical. Different segments of the youth population (based on variation in such factors as gender, education or market access) may have different needs, opportunities and constraints to accessing information, tools and training. Programme planners need to decide which criteria (e.g. education and gender) to use in defining segments, which segments to target and how to involve potential beneficiaries in the design, implementation and evaluation of program activities (FAO and AUC, 2022).An important debate in past years was whether improved human capital and entrepreneurship were needed to improve small business performance or whether improving access to finance was all that was needed. Research has shown that better management and improved business practices matter for productivity of small firms in developing countries (McKenzie and Woodruff, 2015). Moreover, there is considerable evidence that mindsets such as self-confidence, management, and practices can be taught through entrepreneurship programs, and that such training can have high returns on investment, leading to improved incomes and livelihoods. For example, a randomized controlled trial in Peru found that entrepreneurial training led to improved business knowledge, business practices and revenues among rural, female microentrepreneurs (Karlan and Valdivia, 2006). In Pakistan, entrepreneurial training was found to reduce business failure among rural entrepreneurs, improve business practices and lead to increases in household expenditures, a proxy for income (Giné and Mansuri, 2018). In Cameroon, vocational education in livestock and fisheries management highlighting entrepreneurship had high returns on investment with increased incomes covering the cost of training within two years after graduation (Takamgang and Lhoste, 2021) (Box 1).A programme funded by the French Development Agency not only provided vocational training in agropastoralism and fisheries to 1500 individuals in Cameroon, it sought to 'professionally integrate' youth, ensuring graduates were able to achieve either self-or wage-employment. The curriculum highlighted entrepreneurship in a way suited to the needs of employers and communities. The schools also offered c o a c hin g , in te rn s hip s , a s s i s t a n c e in f in din g employment, help in developing business plans and linking to financial services. Students were selected less on their past academic performance and more on their motivation, entrepreneurial interest and access to land. The financial returns were high. The cost of training and integrating a youth was USD 5770 per year and graduates earned on average USD 2880 per year, meaning program benefits were able to cover the cost of education within two years after graduation. How can we invest in the human capital of young people to become agripreneurs? Developing human capital involves providing inputs that lead to outputs, outcomes and impacts (Davis et al., 2021). This framework (Figure 1) can be adapted for developing agripreneurship.OUTPUT OUTCOME IMPACT Inputs such as training and internships for youth are used in activities that result in outputs such as improved entrepreneurship and skills. These result in outcomes, behavioural changes, such as business startups or improved business practices. Outcomes then lead to impacts, long-term changes, such as increased income for youth and economic growth for society. The framework (Figure 1) also acknowledges the importance of context and external environment, which affect inputs, outputs, outcomes and impact. For example, the regulatory environment may make it easier or more difficult for the output -improved entrepreneurshipto lead to the outcome: entrepreneurs starting businesses. It may also affect the ability of the outcome -the new businesses -to bring about the desired impact of increased incomes.The inputs in Figure 1 involve agripreneurship training but may include different types of education and training covering subjects such as entrepreneurship, crop and livestock management, processing or adaptation to climate change. They may also involve other forms of learning such as internships or coaching. The inputs lead to three types of changes in human capital. These skills include:• Technical: improved management and skills in the agriculture-related enterprises that youth are undertaking.• Functional: leadership, communication, negotiation and psychological aspects of entrepreneurship such as self-confidence and resiliency (Glaub et al., 2014).• Business: planning, record keeping, accounting and budgeting.There is considerable focus in entrepreneurial training on mindset change and skills to enable trainees to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities and take advantage of them. These skills include self-confidence, leadership, networking, creativity, risk assessment, motivation and resilience. Such skills are important in a wide range of endeavours outside business, such as developing public policy to solve societal problems. Business management is also part of agripreneurship training; topics include accounting, marketing and sales, preparing and updating business plans, resource mobilization and human resource management (Valerio et al., 2014).Initiatives to develop entrepreneurship may be accompanied by other types of activities necessary to ensure that improved entrepreneurship results in desired outcomes and impacts. For example, they may be accompanied by financial ser vices or credit programmes to ensure that beneficiaries have the means to apply what they have learned to start or improve their enterprises.Agripreneurship may be developed through formal education, training or through other, often supplementary methods such as coaching (a.k.a. mentoring), internships or apprenticeships (Figure 2). Educational programmes may be at the secondary, vocational, undergraduate or graduate level. A wide range of organizations conduct agripreneurship training including private companies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government services and educational institutions. Coaching, internships and apprenticeships are used by both educational institutions and training entities. In addition, informal (e.g. WhatsApp) and professional networks are helpful in supporting and strengthening entrepreneurship (Hayter, 2013).Other, often supplementary, programsFor potential agripreneursFor practicing agripreneurs The study of agripreneurship in educational institutions tends to be theoretical but many institutions, such as Makerere University in Uganda, provide more practical lessons by involving students in their outreach programmes.Other institutions, such as agropastoral vocational schools in Cameroon, place students in internships on farms or in agricultural companies or agencies (Takamgang and Lhoste, 2021) Public-private partnerships are particularly effective in fostering agripreneurship, as in the case involving Mars Incorporated, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Government of Indonesia providing training to smallholder cocoa growers (Bogor et al., 2021). Many educational institutions also provide training to persons not pursuing degrees or diplomas. Some programs are mobile, such as Enterprise Uganda, which provides short, one-to five-day training sessions to villagers throughout the country (Enterprise Uganda, 2018). On-line and radio-based programs are also popular.Training programmes may be short term, full time for one to two weeks, or periodic (e.g. one evening per week over several months). Some focus on a particular vocation w hile oth e r s a re m ore ge n e r a l . S om e e mp h a size entrepreneurship alone, others supplement vocational or other topics.Incubation hubs are also being established to support young agripreneurs. An incubation hub is an entrepreneurial facility that supports development of ideas from basic concepts into viable business ventures. The hubs foster entrepreneurship and small business development and may be hosted by NGOs, universities or private companies (Box 2).Upon obtaining his degree in veterinary sciences in Rwanda in 2016, Mr. Innocent Twizeyimana sold inputs. He was doing well but said: \"I was feeling an urge to become more, to expand my contributions and to learn how I can do it; you know, this is something that we are not taught at school.\" In 2017, he interned with the One Acre Fund (OAF), an NGO. He learned the types of analyses to conduct with farmers before taking products and services to them.Mr. Twizeyimana then founded Expanders, Ltd., a social enterprise committed to improving the livelihoods of smallholders. In 2019, Expanders obtained a grant from a foundation to establish a rabbit production centre,in Rutsiro District and used OAF's impact models in developing it. In 2020, Expanders recruited its first intern. \"My managers at OAF challenged my work and that way I learned a lot. Today in my current job, I ask myself and my employees those same questions!\" states Mr. Twizeyimana. Internships, apprenticeships and coaching (a .k . a . mentoring) are other important methods for fostering entrepreneurship. Internships are positions taken by students or trainees who work in an organization or company, often without pay, to gain work experience or satisfy requirements for a qualification. Internships offer an effective way for youth to strengthen skills, gain experience, develop professional networks and improve their job prospects. Interns also benefit their host companies and organizations because they are low-cost, highly motivated and able to bring new ideas and technologies from academia. The Rwanda Development Board has an internship program for university graduates, helping them find places in public institutions, NGOs or private companies for six-to twelve-month periods. Host organizations pay the interns a small stipend. Interns repor ted that they appreciated the agripreneurial skills and experience they obtained from internships. One intern proved how his internship had strengthened his agripreneurial skills -three years after his internship he was the director of his own enterprise and recruiting interns himself (Box 3).Coaches are professionals who are recruited to help agripreneurs achieve specific goals and improve performance. A coach helps individuals think through situations so they can solve problems themselves. Coaches help entrepreneurs achieve personal growth and improve business skills (van Coller-Peter and Cronje, 2020). Mondelêz International (2017) uses coaches in its Cocoa Life programme to assist cocoa farmers (some of whom are youth) in Indonesia improve their production practices.ICTs also play an important role in facilitating the growth of youth agripreneurship. In developing countries, internet use is 31 percent higher among youth than the rest of the population (ITU, 2021). There is considerable evidence that ICTs inspire and attract youth into agribusiness activities, facilitating access to information and connecting youth to business networks (Yami et al., 2019). Youth are often more adept at using ICT than adults and this helps explain why youth predominate in certain rapidly growing ©FAO/Vladimir Rodas agripreneur job categories where digital tools are required, such as village agents in Uganda and Rwanda. Village agents work for private companies and other organizations and link farmers to input suppliers, produce buyers and other service providers (Franzel et al., 2020) 10 factors to consider when evaluating how to invest in agripreneurship for young people Programme planners and policymakers should consider the following factors and actions when considering how to invest in youth agripreneurship:Differentiate among youth and ensure youth participation. Programme planners need to recognize the heterogeneity of youth, decide which criteria (e.g. gender, educational level, digital literacy) are most important in differentiating among them, define different segments and decide which ones to target. They also need to involve members of targeted segments in the different phases of the project cycle: design, implementation, governance, monitoring and evaluation. FAO and AUC (2022) offer detailed advice on how to do these as well as on conducting youth-sensitive analyses.Target young women. There is a need to focus on gender at the same time as youth. Otherwise, the benefits accruing to youth may help only young men, particularly if the unique constraints that young women face are not met. These include domestic responsibilities, which limit women's mobility, access to land and negative attitudes about women's capabilities. Much has been learned already about how to create conditions to empower women and how to increase the proportion of women participating in and benefiting from development interventions (Oxfam, 2014). These lessons need to be more widely shared and applied in new investments in youth agripreneurship initiatives Screen potential beneficiaries. Agripreneurial programmes are most effective when they target youth with entrepreneurial interests, drive and behaviours (Adam, 2019). These are more important selection criteria than past academic performance (Box 1).Offer integrated human capital development methods and supplemental services, such as financial services. In the conventional approach to human capital development, a single human capital development method, such as technical training, is often assumed to lead to employment. But a single method is often not sufficient. As seen in Box 1, vocational agricultural education was not adequate to ensure that graduates achieved employment in Cameroon. Rather, an integrated, holistic approach was required, involving internships, tutoring and coaching, which reinforced and complemented the students' education. The conventional and integrated approaches are compared in Figure 3. The integrated approach begins with a needs assessment to identify constraints to achieving employment and various methods are considered, including foundational training (such as in numeracy or literacy), technical training and coaching. Providing additional supplemental services, such as linking youth to credit and other financial services (e.g. saving societies and opening bank accounts), is also often important. (Yami et al., 2019). Other services to consider include advisory services, market information, insurance and tools for helping entrepreneurs demonstrate creditworthiness.Promote the use of and research on digital tools. Digital tools have important benefits: improved access to timely information, capacity development materials and online training, enhanced communication and networking, increased economic efficiency and added prestige to agricultural enterprises. Moreover, the explosion and success of business models using digital tools has opened many opportunities (Sylvester et al., 2021). The considerable emphasis on digital tools ought to be sustained and increased research is needed to assess their effectiveness in different applications and to explore how access to them can be increased among women, the poor and other marginalized groups. The gender gap in internet use is particularly high in the Global South. The proportion of men using the internet in least developed countries is 63 percent higher than the proportion of women (ITU, 2021).Ensure that youth have incentives to engage. Livelihood programmes engaging young microentrepreneurs often leave them in low-productivity, low value-added sectors, such as retailing produce in open-air markets. Instead, they ought to guide them towards more productive, higher value-added activities such as processing, for which returns are higher (Alam, 2019). Whereas much is made of youth's interest in short-term financial gains, these are not the only incentives they consider. Nonmonetary goals such as social status and opportunities for advancement are also important (Yami et al., 2019). Efforts to enhance the role of ICTs in agripreneurship, such as the \"Farming is Cool\" initiative in Rwanda, help make agripreneurship more at trac tive to youth (Government of Rwanda, 2016).Engage the private sector and facilitate market-based youth agripreneurship. Private sector, market-based methods and public-private partnerships that promote agripreneurship can be effective and help ensure sustainability, as in the above-mentioned cases of village agents and internships where private companies pay nearly all the costs. Governments and projects can play important facilitative roles in such cases, e.g. helping to identify and place interns, financing the development, testing and impact of digital tools that agripreneurs use or supporting the development of innovative pilot initiatives. Leveraging private sector participation and engaging in dialogue for coordination of corporate social responsibility and sustainability strategies can help enhance benefits accruing to youth agripreneurs as well as contribute to economic growth of communities. Governments can implement policies to support youth agripreneurship, such as launching youth internship programs, exempting youth from paying for trading licenses and reducing their tax rates. Strong policies supporting youth agripreneurship, such as Uganda's National Strategy for Youth Employment in Agriculture, also encourage the private sector and civil society organizations to partner with government and to implement supportive measures on their own. For example, in response to policies supporting youth, the Rwandan Private Sector Federation provides advice to youth setting up businesses and helps them negotiate with government agencies on issues such as fees and taxes (Franzel et al., 2020).Encourage integration of youth agripreneurship into other development initiatives. Youth agripreneurship programs could benefit from, as well as contribute to, other development initiatives such as climate smart agriculture; orange economy (activities with cultural, artistic, or patrimonial content); and women's empowerment. Young agripreneurs' lower costs and strengths in such areas as digital tools make youth agripreneurship an attractive add-on to other programs.Conduct impact assessments of different approaches to developing youth agripreneurship. Impact studies show a wide range of results concerning the economic benefits of developing youth agripreneurship. This variation highlights the importance of context in influencing results and the fact that different methods, and the ways they are applied and combined, also affect results. More impact assessments can help us understand which methods are best, how to apply and combine them and under what circumstances they work most effectively. Such findings can help governments and the private sector earn higher returns on their investments and achieve other goals, such as gender equality, at lower cost. Helping to build the expertise in conducting impact assessments in developing countries is also important.• Numeracy/ literacy  Investing in young agripreneurs is vital to address the challenges of rural unemployment in developing countries, and to maximise the potential inherent in youth to advance sustainable rural development. The human capital invested in young agripreneurs can significantly improve their prospects and incomes, and build economic opportunities within their communities, with high returns on investment. Yet, engaging youth meaningfully in agripreneurship requires targeted, integrated, holistic and iterative approaches. Impact evaluations demonstrate the high potential for investments in education and training agripreneurs to improve their capabilities, business performance and livelihoods. In parallel, methods such as mentoring, internships, apprenticeships, and coaching also play key roles in developing agripreneurship, as do complementary programs aimed at improving access to financial services, digital tools and ICT.It is also crucial to employ participatory approaches to empower and engage youth, ensuring that human capital investment initiatives directly meet their entrepreneurial interests, needs and aspirations.Public and private sector policymaking and investment that follow these approaches will help to reduce constraints for young agripreneurs and ensure they are equipped with the right tools, skills and opportunities for development.","tokenCount":"3901"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"2bcb40ac3138a458cffe82e86aa3a70f","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/ca49bff2-cd42-4174-974a-afd4ff208d38/retrieve","id":"-1879976360"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"0b52ac64-2fe7-45aa-bfd9-7c20f4d6312b","pagecount":"24","content":"Germany joined the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in 1971. As a founding member, Germany is one of the strongest supporters of the alliance, influencing CGIAR policies, and enjoying a long-standing, fruitful and growing partnership.The focus of German official development assistance has been on food security, poverty alleviation, and the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources. Each of these goals is closely aligned with the goals of the CGIAR. Germany is among the top five investors in the CGIAR contributing financial, scientific, human and technical resources. CGIAR works closely with the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). In addition to BMZ, CGIAR research is linked to the Federal Ministry of Consumer Protection, Food and Agriculture (BMVEL), Federal Ministry for the Environment (BMU), and the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF). CGIAR collaborates with the German Agency for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), Advisory Service on Agricultural Research for Development (BEAF), German Foundation for International Development (DSE), and others. German scientists and development specialists have played key supporting roles in CGIAR affairs, including the reform program designed to increase development impact, strengthen partnerships, and streamline governance.A snapshot of the Germany-CGIAR partnership in 2003 shows a German agricultural economist, Prof. Dr. Joachim von Braun leading the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and six German scientists serving on the Boards of CGIAR Centers. In addition, close to 50 German scientists and researchers are on the staff of CGIAR Centers. As part of the reforms, a concerted effort to strengthen scientific cooperation and knowledge-sharing was launched; seven German researchers are participating in the post-doctoral program, and two development economists have been seconded to the CGIAR Secretariat, a unit of the System Office.The CGIAR Centers collaborate with leading German universities and advanced research institutes (Universities of Göttingen, Giessen, Hamburg, Hannover, Kiel, Max Planck Institute-Marburg, and others) on crop, livestock and fisheries improvement, agroforestry, forestry, food policies, and other themes. Currently, Germany supports over 40 projects at the CGIAR Centers.■ Over 20 million subsistence farmers cultivate sorghum and millet in large parts of droughtprone southern Africa. ICRISAT launched the \"Sorghum and Millet Improvement Program\" (SMIP). Twenty improved sorghum varieties and ten millet varieties were released in eight countries in the region. In Zimbabwe, one improved variety is grown on 30 percent of the country's sorghum area (www.icrisat.org).■ Rice is the world's most important food crop, and rice demand is increasing in west Africa.The International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER-Africa) is strengthening scientific cooperation and delivering results. Of the nearly 200 improved rice varieties released in the region, about 40 percent have their origins in CGIAR varieties. In Ghana, of the 80 percent of improved rice varieties planted in rainfed areas, more than half is planted with CGIAR material.Conservative estimates indicate that rice improvements contribute $374 million per year to the regional economy. Over 40 percent of this gain is attributable to CGIAR rice research (www.irri.org, www.warda.org)■ Wheat is the most widely grown cereal grain, and a staple food grain for 35 percent of the world's population, providing more calories and protein than any other crop. During the late 1990s, about 80 percent of wheat area in developing countries was planted to CIMMYTrelated varieties and crosses. Returns to international wheat breeding research are high. In monetary terms, it is estimated that the total economic benefits in developing countries is about $2.5 billion annually for research costs that never exceeded $70 million annually (www.cimmyt.org).■ Alex Kahi, an ILRI scientist trained at the University of Hohenheim won the 2001 \"Promising Young Scientist\" Award (www.cgiar.org). The CGIAR's more recent outstanding achievements include ■ Quality protein maize, a more nutritious type of maize bred for improved human health.QPM is being planted on one million hectares in 20 countries ■ New Rices for Africa or NERICAs which combine the ruggedness of local African rice species with the high productivity traits of Asian rice are transforming agriculture in the humid West Africa region. In Guinea alone, NERICAs are planted on 90,000 hectares saving an estimated $10 million in rice import bills ■ CGIAR and its partners are rehabilitating Afghanistan's agriculture. A major seed supply distribution program has been implemented, and technical assistance is being provided to rebuild agriculture devastated by years of war, strife, and drought ■ Integrated aquaculture/agriculture techniques resulting in increased rice and fish production in Asia through new strains of tilapia that grow 60 per cent faster ■ Training over 75,000 developing country scientists and researchers ■ Reducing pesticide use in developing countries by promoting integrated pest management and biological control methods ■ Adoption of zero or low-till farming practices in Africa and Asia, minimizing soil erosion and boosting farm incomes and productivity. ■ Enabling African producers to exploit international pigeonpea markets ■ Agroforestry initiatives developed with community organizations in Asia and Africa ■ CGIAR researchers have won the World Food Prize for 3 years in a row These successes notwithstanding, future challenges are daunting. World population is expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050. Food demand is expected to more than double in a similar time frame. Some 30 percent of irrigated lands are already degraded, and water use is expected to increase by 50 percent over the next 30 years. Science-based solutions for sustaining productivity increases while protecting ecosystems are key to addressing these challenges. The CGIAR's achievements would not be possible without the support and commitment of the 62 members and many hundreds of partner organizations who together form the growing CGIAR alliance. ","tokenCount":"915"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"18b5f486658add05c5f2791a9ea212c9","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/8b11e7ff-a586-4274-a3f9-857dab91f607/retrieve","id":"888547333"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"121e2954-7b0c-4735-a2b0-bbab9262d36d","pagecount":"15","content":"When the partnerships start..• Oil palm smallholders is an important part in the world, particularly in Indonesia• More than 40%• 6 million ha • 3 million smallholders (SH)• The industry shifted from big companies dominated, to SH as a significant contributor• High investment, competitive market • Initially all plasma (intensively supervised by big companies), then more independent (lack economies of scale, technical & managerial skills)Partnerships' effectiveness are questionable  Analyses Method • Partnerships can improve smallholder inclusivity with the correct terms and conditions.• Partnerships can improve the share of ownership, reward, risk, and voice of smallholders if the partner intensively supports the (financial) management and activities related to production and marketing.• Partnership programs need to be designed and conducted in a sufficient period with intensive supervision.• Training programs could improve the knowledge and skills of smallholders but need to be followed by financial and managerial supervision for smallholders to implement the knowledge and skills and receive an increase in production and income.","tokenCount":"161"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"aa8cea9b0f991a560cd20a93c9663f6b","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/29403bd6-2b87-4aae-b381-321f87ac2803/retrieve","id":"-437749851"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"4df0822c-b716-432a-83ae-16bc059b3cb2","pagecount":"88","content":"Nous avons donc ajouté des exemples d'élevages d'insectes qui ont déjà fait leurs preuves : celui des grillons domestiques et celui du ver de farine jaune. En Thaïlande, il y a déjà 20 000 ménages qui élèvent des grillons pour la consommation domestique et la vente sur le marché.L'intérêt mondial pour les insectes, en tant qu'aliment destiné aux êtres humains, ne cesse d'augmenter. On voit naître de nouvelles initiatives, aussi bien dans les pays tropicaux qu'occidentaux, afin d'explorer leur potentiel. Ce manuel est une contribution appréciable à la réévaluation du rôle des insectes comme facteurs de la sécurité alimentaire.La crise de la viande nous incite à rechercher une alternative aux sources de protéines actuelles. Depuis 1970, la consommation de viande a presque triplé et elle devrait encore doubler d'ici 2050. Mais les ressources en terres agricoles seront bientôt épuisées, puisque 70% d'entre elles sont déjà réservées au bétail. De plus, la production industrielle de bétail pèse lourd sur l'environnement. Elle est à l'origine d'au moins 15 pour cent des gaz à effet de serre, qui entraînent un réchauffement climatique mondial. Par conséquent, il est indispensable de remettre en question nos régimes et nos habitudes alimentaires et en particulier notre consommation de viande.Les pays occidentaux commencent seulement à se rendre compte que des millions de personnes vivant dans les pays tropicaux ont une excellente solution de remplacement : les insectes comestibles. On constate actuellement en Occident un grand désir de découvrir les méthodes utilisées par les pays tropicaux pour préparer cette excellente ressource alimentaire. Cela fait des siècles que des populations collectent les presque 2000 espèces d'insectes propres à la consommation humaine. Et non pas parce que c'est une nourriture de pauvre -une idée fausse des pays occidentaux -mais parce que c'est délicieux. La valeur nutritive des insectes n'a rien à envier à celle de la viande classique. Les insectes contiennent souvent de grandes quantités de fer. Cet avantage revêt une importance particulière, compte tenu du milliard de personnes, dont des enfants et des femmes enceintes, qui souffrent d'anémie.Dans les tropiques, les insectes se récoltent principalement dans la nature. Ce manuel en donne quelques exemples, dont le très populaire vers (chenille) mopane d'Afrique australe, le charançon du palmier et les termites, considérés comme des mets de choix dans tous les continents tropicaux. Vous trouverez aussi dans ce manuel des méthodes de collecte, de conservation et de préparation. Mais si l'on souhaite vraiment favoriser la consommation d'insectes, la récolte dans la nature ne suffira pas. Les termites (Isoptera) 7.1 Termites -Afrique du Sud, Kenya À la lecture du titre de ce manuel, vous avez peut-être trouvé l'idée de manger des insectes surprenante ou bizarre. En fait, nous mangeons tous les jours des insectes sans le savoir. Il y en a dans presque tous les produits alimentaires transformés. Les insectes s'attaquant aux cultures et les pesticides étant interdits juste avant la récolte, il est difficile d'éliminer ces parasites à ce stade de la chaîne de production. Ils se retrouvent souvent dans les produits alimentaires pendant leur traitement. Mais il n'y a aucune raison de s'inquiéter : des dispositions réglementaires contrôlent la quantité de particules d'insectes contenues dans ces aliments ! L'objectif de ce manuel est de communiquer l'idée que les insectes, qui sont des aliments à haute teneur en protéines, peuvent très bien s'intégrer à un repas. La consommation d'insectes -appelée « entomophagie » -a fait partie du régime alimentaire humain depuis les débuts de l'humanité, surtout dans les tropiques.Il y a plus de 1900 insectes comestibles dans le monde, dont au moins 250 espèces en Afrique. Les pays où se pratique l'entomophagie comptent environ 2,5 milliards de personnes, ce qui représente autour de 35% de la population mondiale. Les insectes sont récoltés dans la nature ; c'est un produit saisonnier. En Afrique centrale, par exemple, les chenilles sont un 1 Introduction mets très apprécié. Durant certains mois de l'année, 50% de l'apport en protéines provient des insectes. Les groupes principaux d'insectes sont les chenilles, les coléoptères (dont on mange surtout les larves), les abeilles, les fourmis, les termites, les sauterelles et les grillons. Les insectes font partie du régime alimentaire de nombreuses cultures d'Afrique, d'Asie et d'Amérique latine. L'Occident considère à tort qu'on consomme uniquement des insectes à défaut d'autre chose. Dans les livres de cuisine locaux, ils sont souvent décrits comme des mets raffinés traditionnels. De plus, la consommation d'insectes peut empêcher la malnutrition. Ils représentent aussi un élément précieux de la culture culinaire locale à préserver.Les insectes étant une source d'alimentation locale riche en protéines et d'un prix abordable, ils peuvent remplacer la viande. De nombreuses espèces d'insectes contiennent relativement plus de protéines que les sources habituelles de viande, tels que les poulets ou les porcs. Les insectes contiennent aussi des acides gras essentiels et d'importants minéraux et vitamines. Ainsi, les termites une fois séchés renferment jusqu'à 36% de protéines. 100 grammes de chenilles fournissent presque les besoins quotidiens en protéines et en vitamines d'un être humain.Il faut beaucoup plus d'aliments (céréales notamment) pour produire un kilo de protéines animales (boeuf, poulet, chèvre, poisson) que pour produire un kilo de protéines issues des insectes. La proportion de kilos d'aliments nécessaires à la production d'un kilo de protéines animales est appelée « indice de conversion alimentaire ». Cet indice indique la quantité de nourriture nécessaire à la production animale. Il exprime le rendement de la production de protéines animales. Plus l'indice est bas, plus la production est efficace et moins elle coûte cher. Les chiffres disponibles montrent que, dans toutes les cultures, les insectes atteignent des indices de conversion alimentaire remarquablement bas.Ces chiffres s'expliquent notamment par le fait que les insectes sont des animaux à sang froid. Ils n'ont pas besoin d'utiliser l'énergie tirée de leur nourriture pour maintenir leur corps à la bonne température. La production de nourriture végétale pour les insectes nécessite moins de terre que pour le bétail. Les insectes produisent jusqu'à 100 fois moins de gaz à effet de serre que les bovins. Ces gaz altérant très probablement le climat de façon imprévisible et souvent négative, le fait de remplacer la consommation de la viande de bovins par celle d'insectes a des chances de diminuer l'impact négatif sur l'environnement.La qualité des protéines varie selon leur source. La qualité des protéines des insectes est supérieure à celle des sources végétales et semblable à celle des autres sources animales. D'autre part, la collecte des insectes comestibles peut constituer une importante source de revenus secondaires. Les insectes sont vendus sur le marché le jour ou le lendemain de leur récolte. On les fait aussi sécher ou on les met en conserve.La demande mondiale de viande a augmenté très rapidement au cours des 40 dernières années et on s'attend à ce qu'elle double d'ici 2050. Pour répondre à cette demande, nous pourrions remplacer une partie de notre consommation de viande par des insectes car : • ils sont savoureux • ils représentent une source importante de protéines • ils contribuent à la sécurité alimentaire • ils fournissent un revenu supplémentaire • ils ont une bonne valeur nutritive et contribuent à une bonne santé • ils sont moins nuisibles à l'environnement que la viande classique Ce manuel n'a pas été conçu pour servir de référence. Son rôle est plutôt de présenter et de stimuler la consommation d'insectes. Son objectif est de provoquer une prise de conscience et d'apporter un regard neuf sur notre régime alimentaire. Il existe un très grand nombre d'espèces d'insectes comestibles. Nous avons étudié 10 espèces appartenant à 5 ordres différents.Il est important de prendre conscience de l'impact des méthodes de récolte sur l'écosystème et sur le nombre d'insectes disponibles lors de la saison suivante. Il est tentant de couper les arbres pour faciliter la récolte des chenilles ou d'autres insectes qu'ils hébergent, mais il est vraiment préférable de grimper dans les arbres ou de les secouer. Il est tout aussi important de respecter et de maintenir la biodiversité et d'utiliser les différentes espèces de façon durable. Une collecte intensive pour la consommation constitue une menace pour de nombreuses espèces. La plantation d'arbres hôtes bien sélectionnés dans les champs agricoles permettra de disposer d'insectes comestibles.Irritations certains insectes nécessitent un mode de préparation précis pour éviter les effets négatifs sur les êtres humains. Par exemple, les poils de certaines chenilles risquent de provoquer des irritations ou de contenir des substances toxiques. Il faut toujours porter des gants pour manipuler ces chenilles. Ne jamais le faire à mains nues. Il faut retirer les poils des chenilles avant de les manger (en les brûlant, par exemple).Retirez aussi les pattes de derrière des sauterelles avant de les consommer, sinon leurs piquants risquent de provoquer de la constipation.Pathogènes il est extrêmement important de faire bouillir ou d'exposer les insectes à la chaleur pour tuer les microorganismes pathogènes (provoquant des maladies), tels que les bactéries ou les champignons, qui les infectent souvent. Vous trouverez aussi des méthodes de conservation dans les chapitres suivants (ébullition, fumage, mise en conserve, séchage). Les insectes comestibles doivent être consommés rapidement après leur collecte. Ne ramassez pas d'insectes déjà morts pour les consommer.Résidus de pesticides vérifiez bien que les insectes que vous ramassez et leur plante hôte n'ont pas subi de traitement aux pesticides. Cela risque d'être le cas si vous collectez des criquets ou des sauterelles dans des champs agricoles ou des larves de charançon du palmier dans des plantations de palmiers. Après leur pulvérisation, les pesticides restent souvent sur l'insecte et sont toxiques pour les êtres humains.Agrodok no 29 Les Pesticides : composition, utilisation et risques.  Le corps des insectes est divisé en trois parties : la tête, le thorax et l'abdomen (Figure 1). Ils respirent à travers de petites ouvertures situées le long de leur corps. L'oxygène (O 2 ) qu'ils inhalent et le dioxyde de carbone (CO 2 ) qu'ils exhalent se déplacent dans de petits tubes à travers le corps.Les insectes ont un liquide semblable au sang, qu'on appelle l'hémolymphe, généralement de couleur verdâtre ou jaune. Le sang n'a pas la couleur rouge de l'hémoglobine : l'hémolymphe ne transporte pas d'oxygène, seulement du sucre et des matières grasses tirées des aliments. Le coeur la fait circuler dans l'abdomen. Elle flotte librement à l'intérieur du corps, autour de l'intestin, des muscles et des organes.Plusieurs organes des sens sont situés dans la tête : les yeux et les antennes.Les insectes ont des yeux composés, correspondant à plusieurs petits yeux regroupés ensemble. Ils ont parfois d'autres petits yeux isolés à un autre endroit de la tête. Les antennes sont le siège du toucher et de l'odorat. Elles varient beaucoup selon les espèces. Celles du mâle et de la femelle d'une même espèce peuvent aussi être différentes.Les insectes montrent une grande variété de types de bouche, tous liés au genre d'alimentation de l'espèce et à la phase de développement. Les plus grandes différences s'observent entre les larves et les adultes. Par exemple, les chenilles mangent des feuilles en les mâchant à l'aide de pièces buccales appelées mandibules, alors que les papillons aspirent le nectar des fleurs avec une sorte de trompe appelée proboscis.Les pattes et les ailes sont attachées au thorax. Certaines larves d'insectesles chenilles, par exemple -ont des pattes supplémentaires sur l'abdomen.   Le coléoptère adulte possède deux paires d'ailes. La première paire, les élytres, forme une carapace protectrice ; elles ne servent pas à voler (Figure 3). Les insectes soulèvent leurs élytres pour faire place aux ailes cachées (postérieures) qu'ils déploient pour voler. Après le vol, ils replient les ailes postérieures sous les élytres. Les pièces buccales et les pattes diffèrent selon les espèces puisqu'elles sont adaptées à chaque environnement et régime alimentaire spécifique. Les griffes se trouvent à la fin du dernier segment de la patte, le tarse. Ces griffes permettent aux coléoptères de grimper.  Les larves de charançon du palmier sont un mets très apprécié de certaines populations. Cependant, il faut prendre des précautions lorsqu'on les manipule. Elles ont des pièces buccales bien développées avec lesquelles elles risquent de mordre et d'infliger des blessures lorsqu'on les déplace sans précautions. Elles présentent aussi un risque de toxicité : les insectes ramassés dans les palmiers traités aux pesticides sont impropres à la consommation.En fait, les vers de farine ne sont pas des vers, mais des larves du ténébrion meunier, Tenebrio molitor (Figure 6). Dans la nature, où on les trouve rarement, ils vivent dans des lieux sombres et humides, sous des pierres ou du bois pourri, par exemple. Ils préfèrent les environnements humains, où ils infestent les greniers et les entreprises de transformation de la farine. Les vers de farine sont aussi produits à des fins commerciales, comme aliment pour animaux ou appât de poissons et, plus récemment, pour la consommation humaine. Seul le stade larvaire est propre à la consommation.Les ténébrions sont noirs et font de 1,25 à 2 cm de long. Les femelles pondent jusqu'à 500 oeufs qui éclosent au bout d'environ 7 jours. Les larves (vers de farine) sont blanches au départ, puis prennent rapidement une couleur marron jaunâtre. Le stade larvaire dure de quatre semaines à plusieurs mois, selon l'humidité et la température ambiantes. Les vers à farine ne passent pas par un nombre de stades de croissance fixe et peuvent muer de 9 à 20 fois. Ils grandissent jusqu'à 2 à 3 cm avant de se nymphoser. Le stade nymphal dure autour de 7 jours avant l'émergence des ténébrions.On utilise les vers de farine comme nourriture pour oiseaux, reptiles et poissons, ainsi que pour la consommation humaine. Une fois lyophilisés (congélation sèche à l'azote), ils se mangent tels quels. Lorsqu'on les acquiert vivants, on les tue en les congelant, puis on les fait frire ou griller avant de les manger. Les vers de farine ont un léger goût de noisette. Ils complètent un grand nombre de plats : salades, omelettes et desserts -ou chocolats. On les mange aussi comme snack.Bien qu'on trouve le vers de farine dans de nombreuses régions du monde, dans les lieux d'entreposage des céréales, il est rarement récolté dans la nature, mais provient plutôt d'élevages d'amateurs ou de producteurs commerciaux.La production permet une récolte pendant toute l'année. Les vers de farine sont élevés à la maison, dans des récipients aux bords lisses d'environ 5 cm de haut, pour empêcher les larves et les adultes de s'échapper. Ces insectes ne volent pas. Une température de 25 à 28 o C et une humidité relative autour de 60% constituent les conditions idéales pour leur production.Ils sont nocturnes et préfèrent les environnements sombres. Séparez autant que possible les insectes de différents stades de développement, car les adultes comme les larves sont cannibales. Couvrez les récipients d'une couche de son de blé, qui leur servira à la fois d'aliment et de substrat pour se cacher et pondre des oeufs. En ajoutant de 5 à 10% de levure de bière ou de levure de boulanger, vous leur donnerez des protéines et des vitamines, ce qui accélèrera la croissance des larves. Fournissez-leur de l'humidité sous forme de morceaux de fruits ou de légumes. Des boîtes à oeufs placées dans le récipient assureront un abri supplémentaire. Les femelles pondront leurs oeufs dans le substrat. Ces oeufs gluants ne sont pas faciles à retirer du récipient. Il est préférable de déplacer régulièrement les ténébrions adultes dans un autre récipient pour qu'ils ne mangent pas les oeufs. Retirez aussi les nymphes d'un récipient qui contient des larves. Il n'est pas nécessaire de les placer sur un substrat (Figure 6.3). Séparez aussi les ténébrions adultes des nymphes pour empêcher le cannibalisme.On récolte les vers de farine lorsque la larve atteint une taille d'environ 2 àEspèces apparentées D'autres espèces sont élevées à des fins commerciales pour la consommation des êtres humains et des animaux : le vers buffalo (Alphitobius diaperinus) et le vers de farine géant (Zophobar morio).Les cétoines du genre Gnathocera sont l'un des nombreux insectes consommés au Togo (Afrique de l'Ouest). Dans la région centrale du Togo, les nombreuses espèces de Gnathocera sont regroupées sous le nom de « Îgbokpowa », dans la langue Tem ou Cotocoli. Nous présentons ici les différentes espèces du genre Gnathocera ensemble, ce qui correspond à l'habitude locale de les regrouper ; nous ne traiterons pas d'espèce individuelle. Nous nous intéresserons particulièrement aux espèces collectées et consommées dans la région.Ces petits coléoptères une fois adultes ont une longueur de 1,5 à 3,5 cm et présentent des couleurs très variées (Figure 7). Les élytres ont souvent une teinte jaune mordoré. Le prothorax, la partie située entre la tête et l'abdomen, est noir avec trois rayures blanches. Ces coléoptères subissent une métamorphose complète : ils passent par différents stades larvaires et un stade nymphal avant de devenir des imagos, des adultes. Ils vivent dans les herbes et sont herbivores. On les trouve habituellement sur les panicules des graminées des savanes et des forêts des régions afro-tropicales.Le village de Kpéwa, au Togo, en abrite huit espèces comestibles (Figure 7) : Gnathocera trivittata nyansana Kolbe, la forme foncée de Gnathocera trivittata aegyptiaca Kraatz, Gnathocera flavovirens Kolbe, Gnathocera impressa Olivier, Gnathocera varians Gory et Percheron, Gnathocera hyacinthina Janssens, Gnathocera angustata nana Schürhoff et Gnathocera sp..Les cétoines adultes sont ramassées dans la nature. Il n'existe actuellement aucune méthode d'élevage de ces insectes. Leur collecte se fait durant la saison des pluies, entre septembre et novembre. Il vaut mieux capturer les différentes espèces de Gnathocera très tôt le matin. Les insectes sont alors moins actifs, bien qu'ils soient toujours capables de voler. Ce sera plus difficile de les ramasser après le lever du soleil, car leur activité s'accroît.  À la moindre secousse de leur lieu de repos, ils se laissent immédiatement tomber sur le sol. Les enfants de la région utilisent deux méthodes pour les capturer.On place avec précaution un grand récipient sous une panicule, en faisant bien attention d'éviter toute perturbation. Les coléoptères adultes d'espèces semblables ou non sont rassemblés en groupes. On bat une panicule chargée de cétoines avec un bâton ou à la main, ce qui fait tomber les insectes dans le récipient placé dessous. On met ensuite les insectes récoltés dans une caisse fermée. Cette méthode permet d'en ramasser un grand nombre.Les insectes adultes des différentes espèces se collectent aussi à la main. On les ramasse une fois qu'ils ont atterri sur une herbe.Tous les membres du groupe ethnique Tem consomment les cétoines, mais les enfants en mangent le plus souvent. On a donné le nom de « îgbokpoou n'goou' » en langue Tem aux insectes les plus grands, et donc les plus savoureux. Ils sont très appréciés. Il y a deux façons de préparer les cétoines Gnathocera : on les fait sauter ou griller, selon le nombre d'insectes.Lorsqu'on a ramassé un grand nombre d'insectes, on les fait généralement sauter dans une poêle. Retirez les ailes (les élytres et les véritables ailes), puis assaisonnez les cétoines avec du sel et une bonne quantité d'épices. Placez la poêle sur un feu à combustion lente en remuant souvent les insectes. Faites-les sauter pendant environ 20 minutes.Lorsqu'on n'a trouvé que quelques insectes, il vaut mieux les faire griller. Retirez les ailes et embrochez les corps sur un bâtonnet ou une brochette. Faites-les griller jusqu'à ce qu'ils soient bien cuits.Les cétoines Gnathocera se ramassent traditionnellement dans la nature et sont consommées par les populations de la région centrale du Togo. Il est de toute importance de mettre l'accent sur une exploitation durable des insectes à l'état sauvage. Ils gagnent aussi à être reconnus comme aliment hautement apprécié.Nous pensons que la population locale -dont le développement démographique est rapide -doit prendre conscience de l'extrême fragilité de l'équilibre naturel. Il serait bon de développer des pratiques d'élevage à petite échelle pour remplacer la collecte actuelle des cétoines dans la nature.Les Lepidoptera (lépidoptères) sont communément appelés papillons ou papillons de nuit. Les larves sont désignées sous le nom de chenilles. On distingue les papillons, actifs le jour, et les papillons de nuit qui, comme leur nom l'indique, sont actifs la nuit. Les papillons ont des antennes aux extrémités en forme de massue ; celles des papillons de nuit ont des formes variées, généralement sans renflement au bout. Les lépidoptères subissent une métamorphose complète : leur cycle de vie consiste en quatre stades de développement, adulte (imago), oeuf, larve et chrysalide (nymphe) (Figure 8).     Bien que les pratiques varient selon les pays, les chenilles sont généralement ramassées de juillet à octobre. La collecte a lieu à l'aube. On trouve les chenilles dans les arbres hôtes karités (Vitellaria paradoxa) et dans d'autres végétaux forestiers indigènes (Figure 13). Après la collecte, les chenilles sont gardées vivantes dans des bacs et vendues le même jour. On les fait aussi sécher au soleil pendant plusieurs jours, puis on les conserve dans des sacs de toile.On lave les insectes avant leur préparation, qu'ils soient fraîchement récoltés ou séchés. Puis, on fait frire les chenilles fraîches avec des oignons dans une poêle (Figure 14). On mélange les insectes séchés avec de la sauce tomate ou des légumes verts.Les chenilles fraîches et séchées sont vendues en Afrique centrale et en Afrique de l'Ouest. Le prix du marché démarre à 100 FCFA. Cet aliment est particulièrement apprécié par les habitants de Bobo-Dioulasso, au Burkina Faso. On trouve aussi des chenilles à Paris. Elles sont destinées à la diaspora. À Bobo-Dioulasso, les chenilles de karité sont mises à l'honneur au festival Chitoumou, qui a lieu chaque année au début du mois d'août.  Les hémiptères ne subissent pas de métamorphose complète entre le stade larvaire et la forme adulte. Les juvéniles ressemblent beaucoup à leurs parents, sauf qu'ils sont bien plus petits et que parfois leur couleur diffère. Ils ne connaissent pas de stade nymphal. Les juvéniles subissent plusieurs mues jusqu'à ce qu'ils atteignent leur taille adulte.        On a étudié l'intérêt de l'apport d'insectes dans la production alimentaire commerciale, surtout dans les produits céréaliers. On a pensé par exemple à ajouter des insectes dans des porridges à base de céréales, pour les enrichir. Mais aucune de ces entreprises ne s'est révélée économiquement viable. La production domestique et commerciale des insectes n'est pas encore développée.      un criquet, attrapez-le à la main ou tuez-le avec la branche. Placez-le ensuite dans un bocal et fermez le couvercle pour qu'il ne s'échappe pas. Puis lavez le criquet dans de l'eau froide avant de le faire bouillir pendant environ 15 minutes. Dans la plupart du cas, on le sale pour renforcer sa saveur. Puis faites-le frire si vous voulez le consommer immédiatement, sinon exposez-le au soleil pendant plusieurs jours pour le faire sécher. Lorsque les criquets sont bien secs, on les conserve traditionnellement dans des pots en argile pour les manger plus tard. Dans la plupart des cas, on collecte les criquets pour la consommation domestique, mais il arrive qu'on les vende sur le marché pour générer un revenu.Biologie et reconnaissance Il y a 900 espèces de grillons. Le grillon domestique est probablement l'espèce la plus produite dans un but commercial. Ils subissent une métamorphose incomplète : les jeunes grillons sont semblables à de petits adultes sans ailes. L'espèce a une taille moyenne, l'adulte fait environ 2,5 cm de long. Il est marron clair et a une rayure noire entre les yeux. Le mâle est légèrement plus petit. La femelle se reconnaît facilement à son ovipositeur mesurant 2 cm de long (Figure 27). Les mâles stridulent : ils émettent des sons stridulants en frottant des parties de leur corps les unes contre les autres. Solitaires, ils sont bruyants, mais en groupe, les mâles forment un choeur moins sonore. Les grillons domestiques sont omnivores. Ils mangent des plantes, d'autres insectes et même leurs propres oeufs si la nourriture se fait rare. Le grillon domestique est originaire du nord de l'Afrique. Actuellement, des populations de grillons vivent à l'état sauvage en Europe de l'Ouest, dans des lieux où il fait suffisamment chaud (les boulangeries, par exemple). Il est préférable de mettre les grillons dans un récipient en matériau lisse, non biodégradable (Figure 28), pour les empêcher de grimper le long des bords ou de s'échapper en grignotant les parois. Une autre solution consiste à placer une bande de matériau lisse d'au moins 5 cm de large en haut des parois.Les côtés doivent faire au moins 40 cm de hauteur pour que ces excellents sauteurs restent à l'intérieur. Utilisez éventuellement un grillage métallique fin comme couvercle, pour ne pas obstruer le passage de l'air. L'avantage d'un couvercle, c'est qu'il empêche les mouches ou autres animaux de pénétrer dans le récipient pour manger les grillons ou leur nourriture. La production dépend fortement de la température, qui est optimale à 30˚C.Elle permet alors le déroulement d'un cycle complet dans les 8 semaines. À une température de 18˚C, cela risque de prendre jusqu'à 8 mois. Le bon taux d'humidité est de 50 -70%. Une humidité supérieure favorise le développement d'acariens. Une bonne ventilation permet de maintenir l'humidité Pour la reproduction, mettez les grillons adultes dans un récipient à part contenant un substrat humide (de 3 à 5 cm de haut), du terreau par exemple, dans lequel ils déposeront leurs oeufs. Il est conseillé de couvrir le terreau avec un morceau de grillage en métal, à mailles suffisamment larges pour laisser passer l'ovipositeur, mais assez fin pour empêcher les grillons affamés de manger leurs oeufs (Figure 29).Les insectes doivent toujours avoir de l'eau à disposition. Mettez un petit bol d'eau recouvert d'un morceau de tissu que l'on fixe au bol avec un élastique : les grillons pourront boire, mais ne se noieront pas. Des types variés de nourriture leur conviennent ; le plus courant est le pâté de poulet. On peut y ajouter des restes de fruits et de légumes. Les paysans africains se servent de la terre des termitières pour des usages variés. Ils la répandent par exemple sur les terres agricoles pour les enrichir d'éléments nutritifs. On l'emploie aussi comme liant dans les constructions traditionnelles.Il y a plusieurs espèces de termites au Kenya. La plupart ne sont pas propres à la consommation humaine, du fait de leur odeur nauséabonde et de leur goût peu appétissant. La plupart des gens de la région affirment que les petites espèces sont en général moins grasses et moins amères.On en consomme plusieurs espèces au Kenya. Dans la partie ouest de la région du Lac Victoria, on a différencié huit espèces de termites potentiellement comestibles. Mais leur comportement et leurs caractéristiques n'étant pas facile à identifier, leur caractérisation scientifique est limitée.On réussit toutefois à en distinguer quelques-unes. Vous trouverez ci-dessous la description de trois espèces courantes. Pseudacanthotermes militaris (nom local : Sisi)Caractéristiques :1. L'emplacement du nid est difficile à identifier car ils ne construisent pas de monticules. 2. Les termites ailés sont de taille moyenne et de couleur sombre (Figure 31). 3. Ils essaiment de 1h à 3h de l'après-midi, entre septembre et décembre, en fonction des précipitations. 4. Les soldats sont de taille moyenne avec une tête rouge ou petits et de couleur foncée. 5. Les ouvriers sont de couleur foncée et ont un abdomen enflé. 6. Les Sisi sont en général moins gras que les Agoro.Les termites sont des insectes sociaux qui vivent en grands groupes ou colonies organisées. Les insectes se répartissent en trois castes : les ouvriers, les soldats et les reproducteurs. Chaque caste a sa propre morphologie (apparence extérieure). Une colonie peut contenir jusqu'à un million de termites. Chaque colonie est fondée et maintenue par la reine et le roi, qui sont les reproducteurs principaux. Les insectes ailés, sont aussi des reproducteurs. Ils essaiment de colonies bien développées, pendant les journées chaudes de la saison des pluies, pour s'accoupler. Les adultes ailés apparaissent comme de gigantesques essaims, s'accouplent en vol, puis fondent de nouvelles colonies (Figure 32). Pendant le vol -qu'on appelle le vol nuptial -les paires de mâles et femelles termites s'isolent et se laissent tomber au sol. Leurs ailes se détachent et chaque paire va de son côté former un nid dans un endroit favorable. Habituellement, les termites commencent  Les termites en tant qu'aliment Les termites servent d'aliment dans de nombreuses cultures. Ces insectes sont riches en protéines et en matières grasses. Ils fournissent une alimentation de qualité. Leur vente assure un emploi saisonnier aux femmes des régions rurales.Émergence saisonnière, collecte et entreposage Dans la plupart des régions de l'Afrique, les termites sont collectés au début de la saison des pluies (été). Il y a plusieurs méthodes de récolte. Les formes ailées par exemple sont récupérées à l'aide de pièges lumineux recouverts de filets, ou en plaçant une source de lumière au-dessus d'un récipient rempli d'eau. Les termites sont attirés par le reflet de la lumière dans l'eau et tombent dedans (Figure 34).On ramasse les soldats (forme non ailée), en particulier ceux qui ont de larges mandibules, dans la termitière à l'aide d'une tige coupée de l'inflorescence (fleur complète) de laîche ou carex. On introduit une longue tige coupée dans l'ouverture de la termitière, les soldats la mordent et sont piégés. On retire alors lentement la tige et les soldats qui y sont accrochés. Ce sont la plupart du temps les femmes, de tous les âges, qui se chargent de la collecte (Figure 35). Lors d'une bonne année, une seule personne réussit à récolter chaque jour de quoi remplir un seau de 5 litres. La récolte dépend du type de termite ailé. Traditionnellement, les termites qui construisent des monticules (Figure 36), sont récoltés peu après le début   Après avoir récolté les termites ailés, on les fait frire pour enlever les ailes et d'autres déchets, puis on les laisse sécher au soleil pendant plusieurs jours. On fait bouillir les termites non-ailés dans de l'eau pour les tuer, puis on les laisse sécher au soleil pendant plusieurs jours. On les sale éventuellement, pour améliorer leur goût. Une fois qu'ils sont complètement desséchés, on les conserve traditionnellement dans des sacs, des seaux en plastique ou en métal ou même dans des pots en terre. Puis on les vend tout de suite après sur le marché local, ou on les stocke avec précaution pour les vendre pendant la saison creuse.Les termites comestibles sont collectés dans la plupart des régions d'Afrique et servent de snacks. Mais dans certains endroits, en particulier dans les zones de savane semi-aride, ils fournissent un élément essentiel de l'alimentation des populations qui n'élèvent pas de bétail. La préparation consiste généralement à enlever les ailes, à faire griller les insectes et à les saler. On peut encore les réduire en farine que l'on peut incorporer à de la farine de céréales. On consomme les termites en tant qu'élément d'un repas, ou en tant que repas complet avec du tapioca, du pain ou du maïs grillé. On les mange aussi simplement comme snack. Les termites se consomment souvent directement à la sortie de leurs trous. En Afrique de l'Est, les termitières ont une telle importance qu'elles sont la propriété d'individus. Elles font parfois partie de l'héritage à la mort de leur propriétaire.La production domestique ne s'est pas encore développée, vu la difficulté de conserver des nids dans un environnement artificiel et de contrôler le développement des castes. Pour simuler les conditions de vie des insectes dans la termitière, il faut comprendre l'influence des hormones qui déterminent la caste à laquelle appartiendront les oeufs. Avertissement 1. On se sert parfois de produits agrochimiques pour détruire les termitières. Les termites sont des ravageurs qui causent de graves dégâts aux constructions en bois. On les détruit avec des pesticides pour permettre la mécanisation agricole et pour protéger les cultures céréalières. Pour éviter de consommer des produits toxiques, il ne faut absolument pas manger de termites provenant de champs traités aux pesticides.    Vous pouvez aussi mettre les termites sans ailes, grillés ou crus, dans un mixeur pour faire une pâte à tartiner, que vous servirez avec des pommes de terre ou du pain.Les chercheurs Monica Ayieko et John Kinyuru ont préparé et testé d'autres produits : des petits gâteaux, des biscuits, des crackers, des muffins, des saucisses et des pains de viande.    ","tokenCount":"5314"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"32bd968ec69b7ff89674794fc4fa8f81","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/ba4144e3-855b-4103-bd9c-e7f2f6125725/retrieve","id":"-1298591945"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"a7f433fd-79e6-49b4-b3a2-4ece6e068e6e","pagecount":"16","content":"Partícipatory plant-breeding (PPB) melhods were used to develop Iwo .ceeplable, cold-to\\erant nce varieties in Nepal: Maehhapuchhre-3 (M-3) and Machhapuchhre-9 (M-9). Both were derived from Ihe eross Fuji I02/Chhomrong Dh.n. Following the introduclion oflhese varieties from 1993 to 1998_ ¡he changes in the rice landraees and vaneties that fanners grew were studied in 10 villages. In seven of the villages, forwhich dala were analyzed for bOlh 1996 and 1999, fanners grew 191andraces and fourmodem varieties, ofwhich three (M-3, M-9, and Lumle 2) were !he produc!s ofPPB. These three varieties eovered 11 % of the total surveyed area in 1999. The introduction of the PPB varierÍes had tne greatest impact on the more commonly grown I.ndraees. During the years studied, because the new vaneties had exotic gennplasm in their parentage, there was an overall inerease in vanetal diversity. However, in the future, ¡ncreasing adaption ofM-3 and M-9 could result in significant reductions in variet.l diversity.Centre for Arid Zone Studies, University ofWales, Bangor. UK.Most of,his work was carried out with core funds ftom U-SIRO. The ¡nitia! monitoring of 'he adoption and varietal spread of PPB products \"'as joíot1y funded by the UK Dopartment for Intemational Dovelopment (DFIO). project R6636, for tite OOnetit of developing countries and by the Intemational Development Research Centre (IDRe). The views expressed are not necessarily those of DFIO, U-SIRO, or IORC. Machhapuehhre-3 and Machhapochhre-9 are the products ofthe Agricultural Resean::h Station, Lurnle, Nepal Agricultural Researeh CounciL Wo acknowledge the contribution ofall the farmers who eollaborated in the ioítia1 PPB aod in the ,preadofM-3 and M-9. Thetieldwork by B. B. Paude!, community organizer of U-SIRO is apprecíated.Participatory plant breeding (PPB) is increasingly being used for decentralized crop improvement (Weltzein et aL 2000;Eyzaguirre and Iwanaga 1996;Sthapit, 1oshi, and Witcombe 1996;Witcombe et aL 1996). Important elements ofPPB commonly include the use in the breedíng program of a locallandrace or locally adopted variety as a parent, the sereeníng of segregating matel'Íals in the target environment, and the participation of farmers in goal selting, selection, and evaluation.Farmers in the bilis and mountains ofNepal continue to grow landraces because centralized plant breeding has had limited success in producing varieties that farmers wish lo adopt. The use of decentralized, participatory methods could remove this constraint lo the adoption of new varieties. However, the products ofPPB, ifbighly preferred by farmen;, could have a considerable impact on local agrobiodiversity, In recent years, there has becn a growing awareness ofthe value and utility ofagrobiodiversity, and local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and intemational organizations are concemed about the conservation and utilization ofbiodiversity. For example, during the third global meeting ofthe Intematíonal Plan! Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRl), in July 1999, Pokhara, Nepal, the in situ crop conservation project of DI. Ramnath Rao of IPGRl presented one possible impact that PPB products could have on landrace diversity (figure 1). Participatory plant breeding of high-altitude rice was initiated in 1993 by the Lum!e Agricultura! Research Centre (LARC) in the villages ofChhomrong and Ghandruk, both at an altitude of2000 m, in !he Kaski district of Nepal. Eighteen farmers collaborated in selecting between, and sometimes within, 10 F s bulk lines derived from three different crosses made by !he Agricultural Botany Dívisíon ofthe Nepal Agricultural Research Council (Stbapit,.Joshí, and Witcombe L996). As a result of this program, in June 1996, the Variety Release and Registration Cornmittee (VRRC) of N epal made the first release of a variety produced with the extensive use of particípatory methods: Machhapuchhre-3 (M-3) (Joshi et al., 1996). In a participatory varietal selection (PVS) program, farmers at Chhomrong also identified Machhapuchhre-9 (M-9), a sister !ine to M-3, as an acceptable variety. Starting in 1996, M-3 and M-9 were introduced into víllages situated between 1200 ID and 2300 m altitude by NGOs such as the Local Initiatives for Biodiversity Research and Development (LI-BIRD), CARE Nepal, the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP), and LARC.The adoptíon and spread ofM-3 and M-9 were monitored from 1996 to 1999. Five víllages were surveyed in both 1996 and 1997, and 10 in both 1998 and 1999. Only the surveys in 1999 are reported here (table 1). Information was collected froq¡ the surveyed households using semi-structured ínterviews. Samplíng was purposi ve (on1y from househo1ds known to have been given seed of M-3 or M-9). In 1998, farmers were asked about their adoption intentions to assess the possible impact ofPPB products on the diversity of rice landraces. The 1999 survey, which covered about 18% of the households that had adopted and grown PPB products within the last three years (table 1), also collected information on the 1andraces farmers grew in 1996. For each household, the total area of khet land (irrigated and bounded terraees of land where rice is grown) was determined from the land-ownership certificates, and a total inventory of rice varieties, with the area that each variety occupied, was compiled.The rice varieties and landraces were analyzed by the area in which they were grown and the number of households that grew !hem. Changes between 1996 and 1999 were assessed for area and household number for the more cornmon landraces. The statistical significance of changes in area was determined by a two-tailed paired f test between the areas reported for 1996 and 1999. Adoption 01 M-3 and M-9 in 1999 M-3 was introduced to alllO study villages and was adopted in al! ofthern, whíle M-9 was introduced to seven ofthe víllages but was adopted in three (figure 2). The rnost important factors in determining adüption were the altitudes of the villages and the year in which they first received seed. Apart frorn the low-altitude víllage of Bangephadke, adoption of either M-3 or M-9 was at leasl 10% ofthe rice area in víllages that had received seed before 1998.Since the ancestors of the landraces were not kIlown, no analysis of diversity could be done that required a kIlowledge ofthe relatedness ofthe cultivars with each other. However, richness can be assessed by the number oflandraces and varíeties grown (figure 3) for the seven villages for which Ihere were data for both 1999 and 1996. The total number ofrice cultivars decreased líttle in the study víllages. Thís was despite the adoptíon of varíeties produced by PPB that might have been expected to have replaced several of the landraces. The number of rice cultívars grown in 1999 increased in two ofthe study víllages and decreased in two, while in three ofthe villages there was no change (figure 3).The decrease in díversity in Chhornrong and Ghandruk i5 not 5urprísing since the inítial PPB prograrn was conducted in these villages. In the early stages, as manyas nine lines were grown in 1996 at Chhornrong alone, but by 1999, the undesirable Unes had been dropped. Another case of decrease was in Chane and Kimche, where adopting households dropped the Tairige and Takmare landraces to grow M-3 even though M-3 covered less than 15% ofthe total rice aTea.In a11 of the seven study víllages, sorne of the rice area that was under landraces in 1996 was occupied in 1999 by M-3 and M-9. This increased genetíc diversity, since M-3 and M-9 have exotic germplasm in their ancestry. M-3, M-9, and Lumle-2 all have a locallandrace, Chhornrong Dhan, as a parent. Fuji 102, an exotic varíety from Japan, ís a parent of M-3 and M-9, and IR36, an Interoatíonal Rice Research Institute (IRRl) varíety, is a parent ofLumle-2. Chhomrong Dhan was grown in only tbree oflhe seven villages, so in four oftbem, there was no cultivar Ihal was genetically related lo tbe PPB products.In 1999, farmers grew 19 landraces and five modero varíeties in tbe seven study villages for which both 1996 and 1999 data were available. Of the five modem varietíes, !bree were tbe products of PPB (M-3, M-9, and Lumle-2). The average area devoted to any landrace by tbe households in tbe study villages was quitesmall «0.3 ha) (figure 4). Oflhe 191andraces in these seven villages, 12 were reasonably common (figure 4). Oftbe seven less common, five were grown by only one oftbe sampled households and two had a combination oflow household number and a small average area.While studying the occurrence and diversity ofIocallandraces in Kaski Ca low to mid-hill site, 750 m to 1300 m) and Bara (100 m to 150 m), Joshi el al. (1999) found tbat only a few landraces were widely grown. The great majority oflandraces or varieties were less common and had eitber a small area or few households growing them, or botb. A similar result was found for ghaiya (upland rice) landraces (Joshi et aL, forthcoming). This was also found for modem varíeties in the Nepal Teraí (Joshi and Witcombe, tbis volume). Farroers' pereeptions in 1998. In 1998, fanners' perceptíon8 of the iropact that PPB products would have on local landrace diversity were recorded. Most of the respondents reported that they would increase the area under M-3 or M-9. About 24% ofthe respondents reported that the adoption ofM-3 or M-9 would either reduce the area under landrace Kathe or entírely replace it A similar situation was perceived for landraces Kalopatle (8% of respondents), Maisara (6%), Raksali (3%) and Darmalí (3%). A fllrther 10% ofthe surveyed households al80 mentíoned the possíble partial replacement of I O other landraces and one modern varíety, No households reported that they would entírely replace the landrace Chhornrong Dhan or Ihe modern variety Khumal-4, even though at leas! one household mentioned the complete-replacement of at leasl one ofthe remaining 19 landraces.The 1999 survey confinned mosl of the 1998 perceptions, The area and number of adoplíng households ¡ncreased significantly for M-3 and M-9 (figure 5). The ¡ncreasing adoptíon ofM-3 and M-9 is líkely lo have far greater impact on landrace diversíty in the future than what had already taken place by 1999.In 1999, the area under 12 out of the 19 landraces had decreased, whíle for eight of them, the number of adopting households decreased. Area was more dynamic than the number of households probably because a decision to change the area under a landrace is more common than to entirely drop a landrace or adopt a new one.  .. .. Figure 5 Change in area and household adopters from 1996 to 1999 for M-3 and M-9 in seven villages (see table 1)As an example, the changes in adoption of rice cultivars from 1996-1999 were analyzed for the seven villages shown in figure 3. The decrease in area was statistically significant for eight oflhe 10 most common landraces, i,e., Chhomrong Dhan, K.hate, Kalopatle, and Sinjali (p < .001), Raksalí and Rakse (p < ,O 1), and Darmali and Maisare (p :::; .05). In al! cases, this decrease was largely accounted for by a compensating íncreasc in M-3 and M-9. Ofthese six landraces, four ofthem had becn mentioned by farmers for possible replacement in the 1998 survey.Most sígnificantly, tbree ofthe eight landraces where the number of adoptíng households declined were those that were grown by the most households. Hence, it was mainly Ihe most common landraces Ihat had fewer adopters in 1999 than in 1996, and the less common landraces were the most buffered against change, AH of Ihe five landraces with only a single household in 1996 were also grown by a single household in 1999 (figure 6). :._-lt-........• _.Household numberNote; Cultivars with significant changes in area have been indicated by asterisks (*.* = p .$ .001; ** = P S .01; *' \"' \" P ｾ ＠ .05).Nonsignificant changes are indicated with 'n,' elose 10 the 1996 ori¡¡in of!he lineo Tho significance of changes in adopting households was not tested.Figure 6. Change in area and household adopten from 1996 to 1999 for higb altitude rice landraces alter ¡be introduction of M-3 and M-9 in seven villages (see table 1)Varietal change is a common and continuous process in most subsíslence farming where farrners allocate different proportions oftheir land lo a cultivar from one season to anolher. Landraces !hat most c10sely match Ihe new varieties, but have a lower yield or other undesirable traits, are replaced first. The landraces wilh Ihe greatest reduction in area and adopting households were Chhornrong Dhan, Kalhe, and Kalopatle. The niches ofthese varieties closely match Ihose ofM-3 and M-9.By 1999, six years after Ihe commencement of the PPB program, Ihe products of PPB occupied about 11% of Ihe total rice area and about 14% of Ihe surveyed households. There is a continuing trend ofincreasíng adoption ofM-3 and M-9 in both area and household number. In Ihe past, in spite of concerted efforts by government extension agencies lo promote modem rice varieties, Iheir adoption was very poor. For example, only 100/.,-11 % of farming households were growing improved rice cultivars in a survey of 1688 households in 11 districts of eastem and westem Nepal nearly three decades after the intervention of improved varieties (Chemjong e! al. 1995;LARC 1995). Targeting specific niches that were not addressed by conventional breeding programs is one ofthe objectives ofPPB. The increasing acceptance ofPPB products in the study villages provides evidence for its success.To conserve landraces, maintaining diversity at the community leve! should be sufficient. Although there was an oyeran 105s in landrace richness in the sample, it was no! severe and M-3 and M-9 added to the diversity. Landraces found to be mos! al risk can be utilized in particípatory plant breeding programs so tha! their useful genes are incorporated in more productive genotypes and hence conserved. In terms ofutility and food security, diversity at the household level may be more important, and the addition of either or both M-3 and M-9 to the varietal portfolios of about 14% of the farmers would contribute to this diversity.An important finding was tha! the adoption of landraces was highly dynamic, wi!h losses and gains at the village level and cornmon changes in areas. Ex situ conservation is simply a \"snapshot\" of a situation in the year in whích the coHechon was marle. PPB, in producing varieties that farmers Iike, contributes to the dynamism. It accelerates cbange by introducing genes and genotypes but may not fundarnentally cbange the age-old process ofvarietal adoption. Indeed, as argued by Witcomhe et al. (1996), PPB in ils collaborative form in farmers' fields is a dynamic form of in situ genetic conservation.Maize (Zea mays L.) is the second most importan! crop after rice in Nepal. It is grown largely on ban land (rainfed upland cornmonly associated with farm forestry) during summer and usually rotated with millet or beans. Maize is also grown as the sole crop at lower altitudes (below 1000 m) and at higher altitudes (above 1600 m). It is also grown in khet land (bunded land where at least one crop of puddled rice is cultivated) at altitudes below 1000 m during the spring season. Maize cultivation occupies nearly 0.8 million hectares (almost 30% of the total cultivated area), and 80% of this is under terraced hill fanning, producing over 1.3 millíon tones/annum (MoA 1995).The productivíty ofmaize is quite low (about 1.7 tonneslhectare), which is reflected by a high incidence offood-deficit households in the hills ofNepal. A number of factors appear to be involved in M, Subedi is a prograrnme officer (plant breeder), P.K. Shrestha is a programme officer (socioeconomist), S. Sunwar is an asst, plant the low productivity ofmaize in the middle hílls ofNepal. These ínclude raínfed farming with uncertain rainfall, poor access to chemical fertilizers and declining application of organic manure, and lack ofvarietal options and access to improved genetic malerials suitable lo local conditions.ln areas where improved maize varieties have been introduced, farmers tend lo grow the same seed for a number of years without replacing it or without practicing standard seed-selection procedures. As a result, these varieties generally deteriorate rapidly due to genetic contamination with poorer heterogeneous landraces aml/or due lo unconscious selection for negative traits, as farmers generally use either grain for seed or seleet harvested cob for the seed. Practice ofselecting standing plants for the seed is rarely seen among the farmers.From the point ofview ofvarietal improvement, the problem ofmaize production in the hilly areas ofNepal is therefore threefold. First, farmers' access to new, improved germplasm is highly limited; second, the recommended varieties do no! mee! the multiple varielal needs of local farmers; and third, varietal deterioration occurs over time in the farmers' fields. To address these problems, Local Initiatives for Biodiversity Research and Development (LI-BlRO) is currently researching a farmer-Ied participatory plant-breeding (PPB) exercise in maize in the Gulmi district ofthe westem hills ofNepal.The maize-growing envirornnent of Gulmi has a unique geophysical envirornnent and represents the large hi1ly areas of the Palpa, GuImi, and Arghakhanchi districts extending towards Pyuthan and further west. The maize is grown in outward sloped terraces of bari land under raínfed conditions, with minimal external inputs (seeds, fertilizers, and plant-protection measures). Farmers in the area have poor access lO agricultural inpuIs, including improved genetic materials (Kadayat et al. 1998;Sthapit el al. 1997). Moreover, access 10 new sources of maize germplasm-thal closely matches farmer-preferred traits-in the traditional seed-supply system is limited. A survey ofpreferred trails carried out in 16 villages in the Gulmi district revealed that grain and fodder yield, aato (grit) recovery, taste in various cuisines, graín color, resistance to lodging, and time ofmaturity are the most cornmonly cited preferred traíts (Subedi and Shrestha, Unpublished; Kadayat et al. 1998). As a result, the major proportion of the maize area in the Palpa, Gulmi, and Arghakhanchi districts is planted to local varieties. The local varieties are the products of continuous seed selection carried out by farmers, consciously or unconsciously, over many generations and are well adapted to the local envirornnents and meet furmers' multiple needs. However, these varieties have a number of undesirable traits that require urgent attention in order lo ensure food security in the regíon.LI-BIRO carried out a study to analyze the situation in the Gulmi and Arghakhanchi districts lo develop a future strategy for agriculture. Maíze was the most important crop; however, average productivity was reported to be low: below 1.5 tfha in both districts (Kadayat et al. 1998;Sthapit et al. 1997). This may be partly due lO a low supply of inputs in these districts, as the improved seed sold by Ale during 1996/97 was 1.22 mt in Gulmi and 0.91 mI in Arghakhanchi (Kadayat et al. 1998;   Sthapit et al. 1997). Researchers concluded that the low maíze 'yields were due to poor access to new, improved genetic materials and deterioration offarmers' maintained variety because ofpoor seed-management practices (figure 1). In such a situation, providing farmers with improved maize varieties and seed-selection skills appeared to be a practical and sustainable solution. As a resuIl, helping farmers improve local maize varieties for yield-related traits became the goal of the programo An extensive reconnaissance survey was conducted in large areas of the Palpa, Gulmí, and Arghakhanchi distrícts during the process of selecting research sites for the project A rapid survey of28 villages was done, and farmers were consulted to verify the research problems in maize production and determine lhe suítability of these villages for implementation ofthe research programo Potential sites were screened and narrowed down to síx villages. Particípatory rural appraisal (PRA) and field observations were done by a multidisciplinary team in lhese villages. Discussions were held in the farming cornmunities during the site-selection process in order to colleet information about lhe geophysical condition ofthe area, socioeconomíc situation ofthe farming cornmunities, and farmers' interest ín ｾ ＠ lhe proposed programo Problems were discussed with farmers in greater length during lhe survey. Preferred-trait analysis was done during the PRA to verify the researchable problems. Major traits of interest and problems associated with the preferred traits were identified in the process.Varietal performance for the trait of interest was díscussed wilh farmers duríng lhe site-selectíon survey in order to understand farmers' needs and varíetal strengths and weaknesses in relation to a particular trait. Thís exercise was important in order to develop a breeding program based on needs and problems. In this process, ínformatíon on lhe desirable and undesirable characteristics ofbolh local and reeornmended ímproved varietíes was colleeted.Farmers were found to grow a number ofvarietíes (viz. Thulo pinyalo, Thulo seto, Sano pinyalo, Sano seto, Amrikane, Kaude, Rato dhanthe, Thorgeli pinyalo) to suit their growing environment and to meet theír household needs. Thulo pinyalo is the mosl popular variety ofthe region and occupies as rnuch as 80% ofthe maize area in sorne villages. Farmers liked rnost ofits traits. This variety has good taste in all recipes, good grain and fodder yield, the biomass (both green and dried) is very rnuch líked by the livestock, and it is easy to sel! and barter because it has bold, fiint grain with an attractive grain color. However, farmers had lodging problems with this variety, leading to as much as 85% production 1055 in the worst season (table 1). Lodging problerns are equally high in other local varieties (viz. Thulo seto and Amrikane); however, the arca under these varieties is very low. It was reported that the low production of Thulo pinyalo has more significant implications for the food security ofthe region than any other variety. So, the lodging in Thulo pinyalo was considered a major problem.Resistance to lodging frorn thick stalks and strong, stout plants has been perceived by the farmers of the surveyed villages as the rnost desired characteristic in a recommended improved variety (table 2). The least desired characteristics were a relatively low grain and fodder yield compared to that of large local varieties, followed by inferior taste. Low fodder yields have been found to be associated with the low height of improved maize varieties, compared to local varieties. Farmers of Banjha reported lhat al! fue improved varieties under cultivation in the village were introduced nearly six years before, and now there is no difference between local and ímproved, due to heavy and récurren! cross-fertilization with local varieties.F armers of the surveyed villages reported that high-yield potential and resistant to lodging were the most preferred traits for maíze, followed by good taste and high stover yield (table 3). Farmers perceived that graín yield is closely associated wíth the extent of lodging; they felt that these two parameters are highly interrelated and essentially synonymous. Farmers ofDarbar-Devisthan reported that lodging problems are due to tall plant height, and therefore, they perceived relatively shorter plant height as one of the mos! preferred traits to be considered in the maize improvement programo Revisiting farmers 10 discuss maize-production problems in the targeted area and to verify research hypotheses with farmers revealed that causal relationships in poor maize performance were no! properly established. Earlíer, a new research hypothesis surfaced, which explained Ihat the poor ment, considering their resources (time), knowlcdge, and skills, were chosen by the farmers' group. There were mainly three types of activities: a mass-selection program, a crossing program, and a participatory variety selection (PVS) programoThe involvement of farmers in analysis of researchable problems helped change the researchers' perceptions ofthe problem (table 4) and redefine the goal oflhe maize-improvement programo The redefinirion ofthe breeding goals ofthe maize-improvement program provided guidelines for refining the research process !hat had been proposed initially. A multiple approach (mass selection, crossing, screening of improved/pipeline varieties, and PVS) was taken to address the problems, some of which had not been considered before, F armers liked the mass-selection technique because they perceived it as a simple method and as a possible option to improve specific traits, keeping the desirable traits ofthe variety intact. The crossing program was chosen in consideration ofthe slow genetíc gain in fue mass-selection method, partícularly in farmers' fields, Considering the long gestation period ofthe variety-improvement program, which may delay the delivery ofbenefits to the farmers, the variety-selection program was planned. This would provide farmers with access to new, improved genetic materials to test in ruverse farming situations,A farmers' research committee was formed at each site in order lo empower farmers and to ensure farmers' leadership in the project. It was decided that the committee would be equally responsible for the planning, implementation, and mO!litoring ofproject activities. The committee works as an interface between farmers and researchers. It is expected that involving farmers in the planning and  ","tokenCount":"3999"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"39217cd313bf81e600547ced37779496","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/cff8ffee-30af-4d5c-b674-f99721ec3acf/retrieve","id":"1791053120"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"59b9c1b8-b471-42af-a00e-dd4f30d01dc5","pagecount":"1","content":"Our statistical analysis showed that using combined direct and indirect methods of poverty estimation allowed us to better discriminate between poverty levels in the study area. Analysis of the geographic distribution of poverty shows some clustering according to distance from major roads and the city of Pucallpa. More basic needs are unmet in the areas on the floodplain of the Ucayali River (Figure 2). This is likely due to the use of the most readily available house construction materials and the lack of sewer systems on the floodplain. The household and education indices show that areas near the main road between Pucallpa and Lima fare better than those areas on the margins of the study area (Figure 3 and 4).Comparing the indices to the date of deforestation shows that areas most recently deforested have low index numbers, indicating that they are less well off than those areas that were cleared decades ago (Figure 6). The newly settled areas are occupied by recent immigrants practicing slash and burn agriculture. Many of these people have left other parts of the study area or other areas in Peru due to economic hardship. Areas deforested decades ago have had to intensify their agricultural activities in order to endure land degradation. Many of these areas have larger farm sizes and more developed activities. These areas may have had the time necessary to improve their economic situation, while people on the margin lack the time necessary to improve their livelihoods.After the indices were created we mapped the values for the villages in the study area, overlaying this distribution on the map of deforestation in the region (Figure 5). By estimating the date that each village was deforested, this analysis helps us assess the evolution of poverty conditions along the deforestation continuum. Figure 3. The household index combines information on household type (house, apartment, cabin, shack, etc), tenure, construction materials, water sources, sewage system, electrification, kitchen type, space in the household for economic activity, home appliances, telephone connection, vehicles and persons per room  Our methods combined field visits to the region, interviews with farmers and both government and non-government officials, analysis of environmental and geographic information, and multivariate statistical analysis of agricultural and population census data. This combination of methods was assembled to give us a comprehensive view of poverty problems in the study area, and permit us to add environmental and geographic dimensions to the more common approach of looking at the demographic basis of poverty. This study uses a combination of statistical analyses to assess poverty. Direct methods for estimating poverty use an objective indicator that can be observed, such as presence or abscence of measurable assets or household physical infrastructure. Indirect methods estimate values for indicators that cannot be measured directly, such as consumption and income. This study combines analysis approaches by applying multivariate statistical methods to analyze multidimensionality (Principal Components, CATPCA and Cluster Analysis). It provides basic needs typologies to characterize deprivations and complement poverty-line estimates. It also allows us to distinguish between kinds of poverty, relationships between social and productive conditions and interactions between poverty and environmental constraints.We identified questions from the census for each one of the general socioeconomic categories -basic needs, household resources, well-being, agricultural resources and education. Then, principal components analysis was applied to each variable to create poverty indices reflecting these two themes. The household resources index is a measure of the physical characteristics of the household. To construct the household resources index, we used principal components analysis for categorical variables (PCA-CAT). The other indices were developed using the same principal components analysis approach. We produced five indices. This poster shows three of these indices -the basic needs index, the household index and the education index (Figures 2, 3 and 4).","tokenCount":"623"}

data/part_5/0605984425.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"5afa434d9e657775a7aa606f98a42b60","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://repository.cimmyt.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/e376e702-3af6-47d2-999d-c4d1c8c703ea/content","id":"1408118320"},"keywords":["soybean","single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)","genetic diversity","population structure","US soybean accessions","Chinese soybean accessions"],"sieverID":"b5fe0105-1780-4ee3-80b6-5b92c8dc2385","pagecount":"13","content":"Soybean is one of the most important economic crops for both China and the United States (US). The exchange of germplasm between these two countries has long been active. In order to investigate genetic relationships between Chinese and US soybean germplasm, 277 Chinese soybean accessions and 300 US soybean accessions from geographically diverse regions were analyzed using 5,361 SNP markers. The genetic diversity and the polymorphism information content (PIC) of the Chinese accessions was higher than that of the US accessions. Population structure analysis, principal component analysis, and cluster analysis all showed that the genetic basis of Chinese soybeans is distinct from that of the USA. The groupings observed in clustering analysis reflected the geographical origins of the accessions; this conclusion was validated with both genetic distance analysis and relative kinship analysis. F ST -based and EigenGWAS statistical analysis revealed high genetic variation between the two subpopulations. Analysis of the 10 loci with the strongest selection signals showed that many loci were located in chromosome regions that have previously been identified as quantitative trait loci (QTL) associated with environmental-adaptation-related and yieldrelated traits. The pattern of diversity among the American and Chinese accessions should help breeders to select appropriate parental accessions to enhance the performance of future soybean cultivars.Soybean originated in China, and has a history of planting for more than 4,000 years (Hymowitz and Newell, 1981). It was introduced to the USA in 1765 as animal feed firstly (Hymowitz and Harlan, 1983) and has been widely planted in the USA since 1922. To date, soybean is one of the most important economic crops for both China and the USA.There are extensive soybean breeding programs in both China and the USA, most of which rely on a genetic base of Chinese origin (Cui et al., 2001). There have been over 400 publicly released cultivars in the USA, derived from ∼80 soybean ancestral lines (Gizlice et al., 1994), most of which were originally introduced from China in the early twentieth century (Li et al., 2001). In addition, during past decades, the exchange and utilization of soybean germplasm between the two countries has been and continues to be active. The Chinese Gene Bank contains 28,580 soybean accessions, of which 1,718 (6.01%) were introduced from the USA. There are 14,330 soybean germplasm accessions that are conserved in USDA Soybean Germplasm Collection in the USA, of which 5,216 (36.40%) are from China. Some elite cultivars from North America were used in Chinese soybean breeding programs for broadening the genetic base of modern soybean cultivars. During the period from 1923 to 2005, 1,300 soybean cultivars were released in China; according to a study of the pedigree of these cultivars, the genetic contribution from US cultivars to Chinese cultivars was 139.83, accounting for 10.76% of the total (Gai et al., 2015). Moreover, Carter et al. (2000) suggested that Chinese cultivars should also be viewed as an important reservoir of genetic diversity that can be used to yet further expand the genetic base for North American soybean breeding efforts. Therefore, considering the ongoing increases in exchange and utilization of soybean germplasm between the two countries, assessing genetic relationships is a worthy area for further study.The pattern of genetic variation in soybean germplasm resources between China and USA has been evaluated through pedigree information (Cui et al., 2000a,b), phenotypic observation (Cui et al., 2001), and low-density polymorphism markers (Qiu et al., 1997;Carter et al., 2000;Li et al., 2001). Gizlice et al. (1994) analyzed the pedigrees of 258 publicly developed cultivars in US released between 1947 and 1988, and determined that >84% of their parentage could be traced back to only 17 ancestors, and most of which were selected from the introduced landraces from China. Based on the pedigree analysis, Cui et al. (2000a,b) found that accessions from the two countries had few identifiable ancestors in common probably because of different environments and breeders' selection preference between two countries. Using 25 biochemical, morphological, and agronomic traits, Cui et al. (2001) found much more extensive phenotypic diversity among the Chinese cultivars than among North America cultivars, with obvious distinctness between the two groups. Using evaluation based on random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) markers, Li et al. (2001) demonstrated that the ancestors of soybean cultivars from North America and China were clearly different. To date, previous reported results in this research area have been based on a relatively small number of progenitor soybean cultivars using relative low-density molecular markers.Significant progress has been made using high throughput genotyping technologies to detect variability in DNA sequences, and these technologies are now used regularly in crop germplasm research and breeding (Akond et al., 2013;Li et al., 2014;Lee et al., 2015;Zhou et al., 2015Zhou et al., , 2016;;Han et al., 2016;Wang et al., 2016;Chang and Hartman, 2017;Fang et al., 2017;Liu et al., 2017a). In the present study, a total of 577 soybean cultivars or advanced breeding lines from the main production areas of China and the USA were analyzed using the 5,361 SNP markers on the Illumina SoySNP6k iSelect BeadChip. The objectives were (i) to compare the genetic diversity between the American and Chinese soybeans; (ii) to investigate the population structures for these subpopulations; and (iii) to identify loci that have undergone selection based on differences in allele frequencies between the subpopulations. The results in present study will provide useful information to future soybean breeding for both China and the USA.This study examined soybean cultivars and advanced breeding lines: 277 from China (hereafter termed as CN-set) and 300 from the USA (hereafter termed as US-set). Of the 277 Chinese accessions collected from 11 provinces, 231 accessions were derived from the Northern spring (Nsp) ecotype and 46 were derived from the Huang-huai-hai summer (Hsu) ecotype. Detailed information on the 277 accessions can be found in Supplementary Table S1. The 300 diverse accessions of US-set represent a range of materials developed by public breeders in the North Central soybean production area of the USA (Wen et al., 2014); detailed information on these 300 accessions was listed in Supplementary Table S2. The geographic distribution of the 577 soybean accessions was presented in Figure 1.Genomic DNA was extracted from soybean seedlings (leaf) following the protocol presented by Kisha et al. (1997). All of the accessions in the present study were genotyped with the Illumina SoySNP6k iSelect BeadChip (Illumina, USA), which can be used to distinguish different genotypes among 5,361 SNPs (Akond et al., 2013); the chromosomal distributions and quality control for these SNPs was demonstrated in Wen et al. (2014).Using software of PowerMarker 3.25 (Liu and Muse, 2005), minor allele frequency (MAF), genetic diversity, polymorphism information content (PIC), and heterozygosity, were evaluated for each population pool (i.e., the CN-set or the US-set) across the soybean genome. The average and the range of the Roger distance within and between subpopulations, and across all genotypes, were calculated. The degree of linkage disequilibrium (LD) was evaluated by LD parameter r 2 , calculated by TASSEL 5.0 (Bradbury et al., 2007). The decay distance of LD at r 2 = 0.1 was determined as the length of a LD block. Kinship matrix analysis (Loiselle et al., 1995) in TASSEL 5.0 was conducted to uncover the genetic identity between two given accessions by K ij = l [ a p ila − p la p jla − p la + a p la( 1−p la)(n l −1) ]/ l a (p la (1 − p la )), where p ila is the frequency of allele a at locus l in individual i; p la is the frequency of allele a at locus l in the reference sample; n l is the number of alleles defined in the sample at locus l (the number of individuals times the ploidy level minus the number missing alleles); and (n l − 1) is a sampling bias correction. Negative values between two accessions, indicating the existence of a weaker relationship than would be expected between two random individuals, were replaced by zero. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) was performed to estimate the variance between populations and among accessions within populations based on analyses of variance of allele frequencies (Excoffier et al., 1992) using Arlequin 3.5 software (Excoffier and Lischer, 2010). The population fixation statistic F ST between the CN-set and US-set was calculated genome-widely using Arlequin 3.5.Three multivariate analyses, including model-based population structure analysis, principal component analysis (PCA), and cluster analysis with a neighbor-joining algorithm, were employed to divide the soybean accessions into subgroups. The Bayesian model-based program STRUCTURE 2.3 (Pritchard et al., 2000) was used to infer the population structure and to assign the 577 genotypes into subpopulations based on 5,195 polymorphic SNP markers (there were 166 SNPs of the 5,361 SNPs on the Illumina SoySNP6k iSelect BeadChip for which no data points were obtained in more than 20% of the accessions; see the first section of the results). Ten independent analysis instances, based on 100,000 MCMC replications and 100,000 burn-ins, were performed, with the hypothetical number of subpopulations (k) ranging from 1 to 10. The number of subpopulations was determined when k reached its highest value (an ad hoc statistic; Evanno et al., 2005). PCA and cluster analysis were implemented in TASSEL 5.0.Three statistical methods were used to detect the loci under selection. (1) Differences in allele frequency between the CNset and the US-set were tested by Student's t-test: t =, where f exp =f 1 and f 2 were the allele frequencies in the CN-set and US-set, respectively, and n 1 and n 2 were the sample sizes in the CN-set and USset, respectively. The population-specific alleles were determined for each subpopulation based on zero allele frequency in one subpopulation and non-zero in another subpopulation; and different allele frequency between two subpopulations reaching at significance level P < 0.001. (2) F ST between the CN-set and US-set was calculated for individual SNP using VCFtools (https://vcftools.github.io/index.html) (Weir and Cockerham, 1984) and EigenGWAS (Chen et al., 2016). The VCFtools was conducted with a sliding window of 100 kb and a step size of 10 kb (Schmutz et al., 2014) over the whole genome, and the regions with the top 5% of F ST -values were regarded as highly diverged across the two groups. (3) Finding loci under selection through genome-wide association studies of eigenvectors were implemented by EigenGWAS. There were three steps included. Firstly, genetic relationship matrix was generated for the 577 accessions; secondly, the top 10 eigenvalues and eigenvectors were calculated; and then linear model for selected eigenvectors from the second step was conducted.A total of 577 soybean accessions were analyzed using the 5,361 SNP markers of the Illumina SoySNP6k iSelect BeadChip. SNP markers with missing data points for more than 20% (166 SNPs) of the accessions were not used for further analysis, so a total of 5,195 SNPs (96.90%) were used in our study. In the CN-set, the average PIC was 0.2643, ranging from 0 to 0.3750, and the average genetic diversity was 0.3307, ranging from 0 to 0.5000. In the US-set, the PIC ranged from 0 to 0.3750, with an average of 0.2408, and genetic diversity ranged from 0 to 0.5000, with an average of 0.2988 (Table 1 and Figure 2). These results indicated that the Chinese soybean accessions had a higher level of genetic diversity than the US soybean accessions. As expected, there was an increase in the estimates of PIC and genetic diversity for the  entire diversity collection (Table 1 and Figure 2), as compared to either the CN-set or the US-set. Linkage disequilibrium (LD) analysis was performed based on 5,195 SNPs in both the CN-set and the US-set. The r 2 statistic was calculated and tested for each pairwise SNP to measure the degree of LD (Figure 3). In the CN-set, we found that r 2 for 58.41% of the pairwise SNPs were significant level at the alpha = 0.01. Comparatively, in the US-set, r 2 for 59.96% of the pairwise SNPs were significant level at the alpha = 0.01. In both sets, LD gradually declined with increased physical distance. The distance over which LD decays to r 2 = 0.1 was 8,500 kb in the CN-set and 15,500 kb in the US-set. Thus, our LD analysis also indicated that the Chinese soybeans have a higher level of genetic diversity than the American soybeans.We investigated the possible population structure without introducing any prior information or assumptions. Population clustering was performed using the STRUCTURE program. Likelihood (ln) increased continuously, with no obvious inflection point (Figure 4A), which implies that the accessions included in the analysis were very diverse. In addition, the Evanno criterion supported the choice of K = 2 as the highest level of structure (Figure 4B). There were 273 accessions in subpopulation 1, among which 257 accessions were from China and 16 accessions were from US. By comparison, there were 304 accessions in subpopulation 2, among which 20 accessions were from China and 284 accessions were from the USA (Supplementary Table S3). Of the 20 Chinese accessions in subpopulation 2, the ancestors of 15 of these accessions came from US. These results are consistent with the geographical origin and pedigree information of the 577 accessions.In order to validate and gain further insight into the genetic diversity of the soybean germplasm panel, we constructed a neighbor-joining tree based on the frequency of shared alleles among the accessions. The 577 soybean accessions were classified into two major groups (Figure 4C). One group was composed largely of accessions from the CN-set, and the other group was mainly composed of accessions from the US-set. These groupings were almost the same as the two subpopulations identified in our analysis conducted with the STRUCTURE program. PCA has been proposed as an alternative to population structure analysis for studying population stratification from genotypic data (Patterson et al., 2006). A PCA of the entire set of 577 accessions with the 5,195 SNPs (Figure 4D and Supplementary Table S4) also showed a clear separation of the same two groups that were identified in our population structure and neighborjoining tree analyses.Our unbiased population structure, neighbor-joining tree, and PCA analyses all clearly indicated the existence of two distinct subpopulations among the 577 accessions of our study. Clear divergence existed between the Chinese and US soybean accessions. With the exception of a very small number of accessions that were grouped into the subpopulation for the other country (<7%), most of the accessions from the same origin (country) were clustered into the same genetic group. Therefore, the following studies were based on the two pre-defined genetic pools (i.e., the original two soybean populations from China and US).Genetic differences between the pre-defined genetic pools were evaluated using four types of analysis of population differentiation: AMOVA, Roger genetic distance, genetic relatedness, and allele frequency. AMOVA indicated that 19.33% of the total genetic variation occurred among the subpopulations, whereas 80.67% was within the subpopulations. The population pairwise F ST was 0.1933 (P < 0.001) between the two subpopulations (Supplementary Table S5), which indicates a high level of difference. The average Roger genetic distances within the CN-set, the US-set, and the combined dataset were 0.3223, 0.2932, and 0.3794, respectively (Figure 4E and Supplementary Table S6). For the CN-set, 42.18% of the distance values were between 0.300 and 0.400. For the US-set 54.99% of the distance values were between 0.200 and 0.300. Viewing the CN-set and the US-set collectively, 67.75% of the distance values were between 0.3 and 0.4 (Figure 4E). These results clearly demonstrate that the genetic distance within the CN-set is larger than that in the US-set, and the genetic distance of pairwise genotypes between subpopulations was larger than that of within subpopulations.Relative kinship reflects the approximate degree of identity between two given accessions (Figure 4F and Supplementary Table S7). In the CN-set, the kinship coefficients between pairs of accessions varied from 0 to 1.4108, with an overall average of 0.0477; 22.76% of the estimates had a value of zero, which means there is almost no relationship. Comparatively, for the US-set, the kinship coefficients ranged from 0 to 1.5637, with an overall average of 0.0416; 22.43% of the pairwise kinship estimates had a value of zero. For combined analysis of all 577 accessions, the kinship coefficients ranged from 0 to 1.0204, with and overall average of 0.0195; 85.37% of the pairwise kinship estimates had a value of zero, indicating that most of the genotypes were not highly related (Figure 4F).The distribution of the differences of allele frequencies (denoted by f 1 −f 2 ) ranged from 0 to 88.63% between the CNset and the US-set and was almost symmetrical (Figure 5A), indicating that selection has occurred in both directions. Absolute values of f 1 −f 2 for 35.78% of the loci were lower than 0.1, while the values for 7.72% of the loci were higher than 0.5 (Figure 5B). Across the soybean genome, the F ST for 56.28% of the loci was lower than 0.1, while the value for 2.73% of the loci was higher than 0.5 (Figure 6). These results imply that a large proportion of genomic regions have maintained similar frequencies in both subpopulations. We performed the statistical tests to determine if the difference between the allele frequencies was significant. Results showed that the allele frequencies of 3,223 SNPs (62.04% of the total 5,195 SNPs) reached the significance level at P = 10 −6 . F ST -values, absolute values of difference between the allele frequencies (|f 1 −f 2 |), and −log(P) of f 1 −f 2 values (P is the P-value from statistical test) are presented in Figure 7. The loci with selection signals identified based on F ST , test of f 1 −f 2 values, and results from EigenGWAS were highly consistent over the 20 soybean chromosomes (Figure 7).The top 10 candidate loci under selection are presented in Table 2. The strongest selection signal was found at SNP locus ss245627275 on chromosome 5. Four loci with selection signal overlapped with previously identified QTLs for photoperiod traits: ss246094102 on chromosome 6 (Liu et al., 2011), ss246490128 on chromosome 8 (Pooprompan et al., 2006;Reinprecht et al., 2006), ss247294954 on chromosome 10 (Li et al., 2008;Kuroda et al., 2013), and ss250485410 on chromosome 20 (Reinprecht et al., 2006). Seven loci with selection signals overlapped with previously identified QTLs for seed quality. For example, ss250485410 on chromosome 20 is in a region associated with seed protein content (Lu et al., 2013), and seed oil (Qi et al., 2011). Four loci with selection signals overlapped with QTLs associated with defense traits: SNP locus ss246490128 on chromosome 8 is in a region associated with SCN (Wu et al., 2009) and flood tolerance (Sayama et al., 2009); SNP locus ss247294954 is on chromosome 10 and is in a region associated with drought (Carpentieri-Pipolo et al., 2011) and flood tolerance (Githiri et al., 2006); SNP locus ss249030246 on chromosome 16 is in a region associated with whitefly resistance (Zhang et al., 2013); and SNP locus ss250485410 on chromosome 20 is in a regions associated with Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS, Swaminathan et al., 2016). Four loci with selection signals were overlapped with yield-related traits: SNP locus ss246490128 on chromosome 8 is in a region associated with seed weight (Kim et al., 2010), and branching (Liu et al., 2017a); SNP locus ss247294954 on chromosome 10 is in a region associated with seed weight (Sun et al., 2012), and branching (Li et al., 2008); SNP locus ss247790225 on chromosome 12 is in a region associated with branching (Liu et al., 2017a); and SNP locus ss250485410 on chromosome 20 is in a region associated with seed weight (Kato et al., 2014).Three loci with selection signals (ss246490128 on chromosome 8, ss247294954 on chromosome 10, and ss250485410 on chromosome 20) had pleiotropic effects on all of the following physiological aspects: photoperiod, seed quality, defense, and yield-related traits. Among the top 10 loci ranked based on the strength of their selection signals, ss245627275 on chromosome 5, ss246165779 on chromosome 7, and ss249429323 on chromosome 17 have not been previously reported to be associated with any traits, and one gene near SNP locus ss245627275 was annotated as RAS-related nuclear protein; one gene near SNP locus ss246165779 was annotated as having a function relating to nucleoside diphosphate kinase activity; and one gene near SNP locus ss249429323 was annotated as having a function relating to protein domain specific binding (Table 2). The calculation of the allele frequency for the two subpopulations allowed the identification of subpopulation-specific alleles. Of the 5,191 SNP markers, four specific alleles for the CN-set were  distributed on chromosomes 5, 7, 10, and 12, but no specific allele existed in the US-set (Table 3). Fang et al. (2017) dissected the genetic architecture of 84 agronomic traits and investigated the genetic networks underling their phenotypic correlations by 809 soybean accessions with diverse geographic distribution. Of 809 accessions, only 67 accessions derived from US, and majority of accessions (683 accessions) came from China, accounting for 84.4%. While in current study, to particularly compare the genetic diversity of soybean cultivars from China and US, and to identify loci that have undergone selection based on different statistical algorithms, we collected fairly balanced samples (277 for China vs. 300 for US; Figure 1) from the major production areas in both countries to reach a high statistical power. The planting area of soybean in northeast and Huang-huai-hai regions is account for more than 80% of total soybean planting area in China. Of 1,300 cultivars released in China from 2005 to 2013, 1,077 cultivars (82.85%) were from northeast and Huang-huaihai regions, and 656 cultivars (50.46%) were the progenies of cultivars imported from abroad. While for the southern region, 223 cultivars were released accounting for 17.15% of the total cultivars released in China, of which 82 cultivars (6.31%) were released with exotic ancestors. As for the materials collected in USA, the situation is similar as those in China. The main production areas in USA are in the central and northern regions, and the released cultivars from southern region of the USA are comparatively small. Considering the reasons above, the 277 accessions in the CN-set were selected from the geographic regions typified by the Northern spring (Nsp) ecotype and the Huang-huai-hai summer (Hsu) ecotype. The 300 accessions in the US-set covered accessions in maturity groups I-IV, which include accessions used in the main soybean   (Reinprecht et al., 2006); First flower (Pooprompan et al., 2006); Seed weight (Kim et al., 2010); Branching (Liu et al., 2017a); Seed coat and hilum color (Zhou et al., 2015); Seed protein (Lu et al., 2013); SCN (Wu et al., 2009); Flood tolerance (Sayama et al., 2009) ss247294954 10 C 44278194 0.0879 0.8426 0.7546 0.7256 114.3218 296.2328 First flower (Kuroda et al., 2013); Reproductive stage length (Li et al., 2008); Pod maturity (Li et al., 2008); Seed weight (Sun et al., 2012); Branching (Li et al., 2008); Seed protein (Chen et al., 2007)  (Reinprecht et al., 2006); Seed weight (Kato et al., 2014); Seed protein (Lu et al., 2013); Seed oil (Qi et al., 2011); Lodging (Liu et al., 2017b); Sudden Death Syndrome (SDS, Swaminathan et al., 2016) # Gene annotation information for this locus is \"RAS-related nuclear protein,\" and \"Cytochrome P450 superfamily protein\"; *Gene annotation information for this locus is \"nucleoside diphosphate kinase,\" \"Small nuclear ribonucleoprotein splicing factor,\" and \"Lung seven transmembrane receptor\"; ※ Gene annotation information for this locus is \"Ubiquinol cytochrome c reductase, subunit QCR7,\" and \"protein domain specific binding.\" CN is for China; and US is for United States of America.production regions of the USA. It is important to consider the strong influence of maturity on phenotypic traits in soybean: large pleiotropic effects are well-documented for plant height, lodging, and seed yield, and these large effects tend to overwhelm other phenotypic differences among genotypes (Cui et al., 2001). However, importantly, identification based on genomic data is not influenced by maturity or other phenotypic factors. In the present study, 5,361 SNP markers from the Illumina SoySNP6k iSelect BeadChip were employed to genotype all of the accessions in our diversity panel.The average genetic diversity and PIC-values for the combined set of all accessions were, respectively, 0.3489 and 0.2769. Compared to the previously reported results based on SNP (Hao et al., 2012;Zhou et al., 2015) or SSR (Li et al., 2011) data, the level of genetic diversity that we observed here is lower, almost certainly because the materials used in the present study were cultivars and advanced breeding lines, while the materials used in Hao et al. (2012) and Li et al. (2011) were mainly landraces. We observed that the accessions from the US had lower genetic diversity and PIC-values than the accessions from China. Our conclusion that the Chinese cultivars are more diverse than the American cultivars is consistent with the conclusions of previous studies, including molecular analyses using RAPD markers to predict the likely ancestors of Chinese and US soybean cultivars (Qiu et al., 1997;Li et al., 2001) and a phenotypic diversity study of modern Chinese and North American soybean cultivars conducted by Cui et al. (2001). The lower LD-values and larger genetic distance within the Chinese accessions as compared to the American accessions again highlights that the Chinese germplasm has relatively greater genetic diversity.  (Orf et al., 1999); Pod maturity (Wang et al., 2004); Seed yield (Wang et al., 2014) ss247314990 G 10 47212732 0.0722 Pod maturity (Specht et al., 2001); Seed weight (Han et al., 2012) ss247667029 G 12 8693064 0.0618 Seed isoflavone (Han et al., 2015) CN is for China.Population Structure Analysis of the Chinese and US Soybean Accessions AMOVA, model-based population structure analysis, NJ-cluster analysis, and PCA were used to examine whether or not the 577 soybean accessions were from highly diverse origins and/or whether or not the accessions from China and the USA are homogeneous or represent two genetically distinct subgroups. We used a variety of methods and consistently obtained similar results for both the number of accessions and the particular membership of accessions within groups. The American accessions were genetically distinct from the Chinese accessions. There were clearly two different subpopulations: an American one and a Chinese one. Cluster analyses grouped accessions with similar geographical origins together, and these findings were in accordance with previous studies (Li et al., 2011;Hao et al., 2012;Sun et al., 2014;Zhou et al., 2015;Fang et al., 2017;Liu et al., 2017a). We noted that 93.76% of the soybean accessions were assigned into the subgroup corresponding to their expected geographical origin (Supplementary Tables S1-S3), implying that the geographic distribution of soybean cultivars and advanced breeding lines is a reliable parameter to use for understanding the overall population structure.Regarding kinship, the 577 accessions are distantly related: For combined analysis of the two subpopulations, 85.37% of the pairwise kinship estimates were equal to zero (Figure 4F). The distance between the two subpopulations (0.3794; Supplementary Table S6) was larger than that within either of the two individual groupings (0.3223 for the CN-set and 0.2932 for the US-set; Supplementary Table S6). Our conclusion that the accessions are distantly related is also supported by the significant allelic frequency differences observed among the accessions based on AMOVA and F ST analyses. Significant structuring of genetic variation was found between the Chinese and American soybean accessions (Supplementary Table S5). Viewed collectively, our findings indicate that even though the soybean genetic base in the USA is ultimately derived from only a few soybean cultivars that were introduced from China (Li et al., 2001), and Chinese plant breeders have successfully employed elite Northern American cultivars as breeding materials (Gai et al., 2015), breeding efforts of breeders of two countries in the time have generated a quite distinct genetic base of soybeans. Another influence that may underlie the observed genetic diversity between the two subpopulations is the efforts of breeders over many decades that have been focused on improving local adaptation to different environmental conditions in the soybean growth areas of the two countries.Given the recognized importance of including materials from diverse genetic groups in breeding programs (Thompson and Nelson, 1998;Li et al., 2001), it is important to carefully support the exchange, identification, and utilization of exotic soybean germplasm in soybean improvement efforts.The identification of loci with selective signals is a centrally important step for understanding how various populations have adapted to particular agronomic practices and/or unique environments. The F ST approach for detecting loci that have been under selection has been applied to many crops, including wild emmer wheat (Ren et al., 2013), common bean (Papa et al., 2007), tomato (Corrado et al., 2013), and soybean (Han et al., 2016), among many others, and markers that are identified using an F ST -outlier method often reveal genome regions that have previously been associated with quantitative trait loci (QTL) related to domestication (Ren et al., 2013).In the present study, we used an F ST -based statistical analysis and EigenGWAS to identify selection signals at SNP loci. Although, the majority of the loci had low F ST -values in pairwise comparisons, our data revealed the presence of genomic regions with high genetic variation between the two subpopulations (Figure 6), and the results were consistent with that of EigenGWAS. Of the top 10 candidate loci under selection, four loci overlapped with previously identified QTLs for photoperiod traits, seven loci overlapped with previously identified QTLs for seed quality-related traits, four loci were in regions associated with abiotic and biotic stress related traits, and four loci were in regions associated with yield traits. Three of the loci with selection signals were in regions associated with multiple physiological aspects (photoperiod, seed quality, abiotic and biotic-related, and yield-related traits). One locus ss246490128 on chromosome 8 overlapped with previously identified QTL Sat_215, around which a candidate domestication gene Glymo08g09310 controlled seed size was identified (Zhou et al., 2016). Zhou et al. (2015) also reported four loci related to soybean domestication, which were in the regions of loci ss246490128 on Chromosome 8, ss247294954 on Chromosome 10, ss247790225 on chromosome 12, and ss249429323 on chromosome 17 in present study, respectively. The trait-related loci under selection can result in phenotypic variation between populations from two countries. For example, Wang et al. (2005) evaluated the yield-related traits for accessions from China and the USA that were from similar latitudes, and found that cultivars from the USA had higher plant heights, more branching, higher numbers of pods, and higher yields than those from China. The loci with selection signals that we observed may be (or have been) under direct selection, but it is more likely that they are located in chromosome regions that were selected during the domestication process. The putative functions associated with these loci are that related to the role in adaptation: these loci are putatively involved in processes that are vital for plant growth and survival. The loci with selection signals that we identified in the present study are of potential interest for plant breeders, as they likely contribute to the existing crop performance differences between Chinese and US soybeans.","tokenCount":"5142"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"1a2bde9c0ebf268a018545a2a25819d4","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/ea970a2a-8913-479c-93bf-003e97d7e652/retrieve","id":"1528886440"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"971bde46-3b97-40f1-bbd4-d07d5ecdc3f3","pagecount":"12","content":"Albizia saman is a multipurpose tree species of seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs) of Mesoamerica and northern South America typically cultivated in silvopastoral and other agroforestry systems around the world, a trend that is bound to increase in How to cite this article: Aguirre-Morales CA, Thomas E, Cardozo CI, et al. Genetic diversity of the rain tree (Albizia saman) in Colombian seasonally dry tropical forest for informing conservation and restoration interventions. Ecollight of multimillion hectare commitments for forest and landscape restoration. The effective conservation and sustainable use of A. saman requires detailed knowledge of its genetic diversity across its native distribution range of which surprisingly little is known to date. We assessed the genetic diversity and structure of A.saman across twelve representative locations of SDTF in Colombia, and how they may have been shaped by past climatic changes and human influence. We found four different genetic groups which may be the result of differentiation due to isolation of populations in preglacial times. The current distribution and mixture of genetic groups across STDF fragments we observed might be the result of range expansion of SDTFs during the last glacial period followed by range contraction during the Holocene and humaninfluenced movement of germplasm associated with cattle ranching. Despite the fragmented state of the presumed natural A. saman stands we sampled, we did not find any signs of inbreeding, suggesting that gene flow is not jeopardized in humanized landscapes. However, further research is needed to assess potential deleterious effects of fragmentation on progeny. Climate change is not expected to seriously threaten the in situ persistence of A. saman populations and might present opportunities for future range expansion. However, the sourcing of germplasm for tree planting activities needs to be aligned with the genetic affinity of reference populations across the distribution of Colombian SDTFs. We identify priority source populations for in situ conservation based on their high genetic diversity, lack or limited signs of admixture, and/or genetic uniqueness.Albizia saman (Jacq.) Merr. (Fabaceae) is a multipurpose tree species occurring naturally in the seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTF) from southern Mexico to Colombia and Venezuela (Cascante, Quesada, Lobo, & Fuchs, 2002;Durr, 2001). It is valued for its edible fruit pulp and medicinal properties (Leonard & Sherratt, 1967) and the production of an exudate with industrial applications (Subansenee, 1994), whereas its wood is exploited for manufacturing furniture and crafts (Escalante, 1997). However, the by far most important use of this wide-canopied tree is in agroforestry systems (Figure 1), owing to its rapid growth, the shade provided by its thick foliage, the nutrient-rich fodder produced by its leafs and fruits, and positive effects on the productivity of soils and grazing land (Allen & Allen, 1981;Durr, 2001;Roshetko, 1995). These useful traits have been a major motivation for the introduction of A. saman from its native distribution in Central and northern South America to other tropical areas in the Americas and the rest of the world, where it has often become naturalized (CABI, 2018) (Figure 2).The sustainable use and effective conservation of A. saman requires detailed knowledge of the species' genetic diversity across its native distribution range of which surprisingly little is known to date. Only one study investigated the effects of fragmentation on the reproductive success and genetic structure of the species in northwestern Costa Rica (Cascante et al., 2002). While a better understanding of population responses to threats like fragmentation is essential for guiding conservation and management interventions, it needs to be supplemented with information on genetic differentiation of populations across their distribution ranges.Aside from the idiosyncrasies of their life history traits and reproductive biology (Duminil et al., 2007;Lowe et al., 2018), the contemporary genetic structure of tree species is influenced most notably by their response to past changes in climate and more recent anthropogenic disturbances. One of the most important impacts of climate change in the recent past on neotropical SDTFs is conceptualized through the dry forest refugia hypothesis (DFRH) (Mayle, Beerling, Gosling, & Bush, 2004;Pennington, Prado, & Pendry, 2000;Prado & Gibbs, 1993). The DFRH postulates that the current wide distribution of numerous tree species in disjointed areas of SDTF is the result of the contraction of an extensive and continuous formation of the biome during the last glacial period (18,000-12,000 BP) to the remnants observed today (Pennington et al., 2000;Prado & Gibbs, 1993).The postglacial isolation of tree species populations in different SDTF fragments is likely to have initiated processes of genetic differentiation but seems to have been too short to be detected in the current population genetic structures. An increasing body of evidence suggests that the formation of different genetic groups in SDTF tree species may predate the late Pleistocene (Bocanegra-González et al., 2018;Caetano et al., 2008;Collevatti et al., 2012;Vitorino, Lima-Ribeiro, Terribile, & Collevatti, 2016). According to the DFRH, one would thus expect a similar disjointed distribution of genetic groups within tree species present in different SDTF fragments that used to be connected during the last glacial period. Here, we test this hypothesis for A. saman in Colombian SDTF.Tree species populations in SDTF fragments have been subject to anthropogenic disturbance since pre-Columbian times (Banda-R et al., 2016;Murphy & Lugo, 1986). Conversion of mature SDTF in Colombia to land for human settlements and crop production and pastures for cattle ranching intensified during the European colonization period and particularly so during the past century (Etter, 2015;Vina & Cavelier, 1999). Today, STDF is one of the most threatened ecosystems worldwide (Janzen,1988;Miles et al., 2006). In Colombia, less than 8% of the original STDF cover remains, occurring in a highly fragmented state (García, 2014;González-M et al., 2018). Particularly in predominantly outcrossing species such as A. saman, fragmentation of populations is known to negatively affect the reproduction, gene flow, and genetic diversity of tree populations, resulting in increased risk of inbreeding depression in progeny and loss of genetic diversity and fitness due to low numbers of mating partners and low pollen diversity (Aguilar, Ashworth, Galetto, & Aizen, 2006;Aguilar, Quesada, Ashworth, Herrerias-diego, & Lobo, 2008;Lowe, Boshier, Ward, Bacles, & Navarro, 2005).Here, we elucidate the genetic diversity, structure, and inbreeding state of A saman populations across the main SDTF fragments in Colombia, located in the Caribbean region and the Cauca, Magdalena, Chicamocha, and Patia river valleys (Pizano, Cabrera, & García, 2014) We collected leaf material from 100 reproductive individuals of A. saman between July 2014 and January 2016 across twelve representative locations of STDF in Colombia. Sampled trees were separated by at least 50 m to avoid the collection of highly genetically related individuals (Gonzalez & Quintero, 2017). All biological materials were collected in collaboration with the Instituto Alexander von Humboldt following the Colombian Decreto 302 of 2003.Young and healthy leaves of sampled A. saman trees were preserved in paper bags and dried with silica gel prior to processing in the laboratory. Total genomic DNA was isolated from dried plant material using 80 mg of leaf tissue in accordance with the CTAB method (Doyle & Doyle, 1990) with modifications following Alzate-Marin, Guidugli, Soriani, Martinez, & Mestriner, 2009;Novaes, Rodrigues, & Lovato, 2009;Verbylaite, Beisys, Rimas, & Kuusiene, 2010. Genetic characterization was carried out by means of twelve specific microsatellite markers (Kasthurirengan, Xie, Li, Fong, & Hong, 2013).Each PCR reaction was carried out in a total volume of 15 μl containing 1× PCR buffer of 200 mM Tris-HCl (pH 8.4), 500 mM KCl (Invitrogen ® , USA), 0.25 mM dNTP (Promega Corp., USA), 4 mM MgCl 2 (Invitrogen ® , USA), pmol/μl M13 tagged forward primer 0.1 and 0.2 pmol/μl reverse primer, 0.15 pmol/μl universal fluorescentlabeled M13 primer, 0.03 U Platinum ® Taq (Invitrogen ® , USA) and 40 ng of DNA, following Schuelke (2000). The master mix was complemented with bovine serum albumin (BSA 3%) and/or formamide 2.5%. PCR amplifications were performed in Eppendorf Mastercycler ® pro (Eppendorf, Germany) with an initial cycle of 2 min at 95°C followed by 15 cycles of 30 s at 94°C, 30 s at 65°C, and 30 s at 72°C, and finally 35 cycles of 15 s at 94°C, 15 s at 50°C, and 45 s at 72°C. PCR products were run on an ABI PRISM 3730 DNA Analyzer sequencer and sized with GeneScan 500LIZ (Applied Biosystems) standard size. Allele sizes were determined using GeneMapper version 4.0 (Applied Biosystems).We visualized geographic patterns in nSSR diversity on raster maps of 30 arc seconds resolution by constructing circular neighborhoods of 10 arc minutes diameter (~18 km at the equator) around the locations of all the genotyped A. saman, following Thomas et al. (2012). In practice, this means that each tree was replicated in all the 30 arc second grid cells contained in a circle with diameter of 10 arc minutes constructed around its location.As this replication exercise resulted in different numbers of trees per grid cell, in a next step we performed a sample bias correction by calculating genetic parameters as the average values obtained from 1,000 bootstrapped subsamples of the minimum sample size of 3 trees per grid cell. Grid-based calculations of genetic parameters included allelic richness, the Shannon information index, expected and observed heterozygosity, the inbreeding coefficient, and the number of locally common alleles (LCA) per locus. LCA are alleles that are restricted to a limited area of a species' distribution (here < 25% of the sampled populations) but reach relatively high F I G U R E 2 Global distribution of Albizia saman (red dots). Its native area is believed to be restricted to the region from southern Mexico to Colombia and Venezuela, but it has been introduced to tropical areas all around the world. The countries that are believed to be part of the native range of the species are shown in green, and the locations of the trees sampled in the current study are shown as yellow dots frequencies (here > 5%) in those areas. High LCA richness can be indicative for the level of genetic isolation of populations (Frankel, Brown, & Burdon, 1995a) and can hence be helpful for identifying putative refugia (Marchelli, Thomas, Azpilicueta, Zonneveld, & Gallo, 2017;Thomas et al., 2012).We submitted our data to Bayesian cluster analysis in STRUCTURE (Pritchard, Stephens, & Donnelly, 2000) using an admixture ancestry model without consideration of sampling localities. The number of groups (K) tested varied between 1 and 8, using burnin periods of one million steps and 10 million additional replications. For each value of K, we carried out 10 independent repetitions. We used the method of Evanno, Regnaut, and Goudet (2005) for detection of the most probable number of genetically homogeneous clusters (K), through calculation of ΔK as implemented in the STRUCTURE HARVESTER software (Dent & VonHoldt, 2011). Complementary genetic analyses such as F ST (Nei, 1973) and AMOVA (Excoffier, Smouse, & Quattro, 1992) were carried out in R packages adegenet (Jombart, 2008) and poppr (Kamvar, Tabima, & Grünwald, 2014).We characterized the spatial distribution of favorable habitat for A. saman in Colombian SDTFs under different climatic conditions by means of suitability mapping based on ensembles of modeling algorithms, implemented in R package BiodiversityR (Kindt, 2018).Figure 3 summarizes the modeling procedure used. We modeled habitat suitability during the LGM (~21,000 BP) and mid-Holocene (~6,000 BP) to assess potential impacts of past climate conditions on the current distribution of genetic diversity. We similarly modeled habitat suitability under present and future climate conditions to evaluate the expected impact of climate change on the in situ persistence of A. saman populations.Presence data collected during our field sampling were complemented with Colombian records extracted from numerous sources (www.gbif.org; the national herbaria MEDEM, HUA, MEDEL, COL, CUVC, VALLE and TULV; www.dryfl or.info; www.orino quiab iodiv ersa.org; www.sibco lombia.net). We only included records located in SDTF as defined by the combination of Etter, McAlpine, and Possingham (2008) and García et al. (2014). As a result, 151 unique presence points were used for suitability modeling. Background points (an overall maximum of 10,000 and maximum one per grid cell) were randomly selected from the area enclosed by a convex hull polygon constructed around all presence points and extended with a buffer corresponding to 10% of the polygon's largest axis. We applied two different strategies for suitability modeling under past and future climate conditions. Model calibrations for projections toLGM and mid-Holocene climate conditions were carried out at 2.5 arc minutes and 30 arc seconds resolution, respectively, using only WorldClim climate layers (Hijmans, Cameron, Parra, Jones, & Jarvis, 2005) as explanatory variables. Model calibrations intended for projections to future climate scenarios (period 2040-2069; referred to as 2050s) were carried out at 30 arc seconds resolution, using aside from climate layers also altitude, slope, aspect, terrain roughness, direction of water flow, and seven major edaphic variables, obtained from ISRIC-World Soil Information (Hengl et al., 2014): organic carbon (ORCDRC), pH in H 2 O (PHIHOX), sand % (SNDPPT), silt % (SLTPPT), clay % (CLYPPT), cation exchange capacity (CEC), bulk density (BLD), and coarse fragments > 2 mm (CRFVOL). For the edaphic variables, we calculated a weighted mean across 0-5, 5-15, 15-30, 30-60, and 60-100 cm soil depth values in order to derive a single data value for 0-100 cm. Weights were proportional to the thickness of each soil layer (i.e., 0.05, 0.1, 0.15, 0.3, and 0.4).Collinear explanatory variables were removed based on iterative calculations of variance inflation factors (VIF), retaining only variables with VIFs smaller than 5. VIFs were calculated using self-assembled R script. The resulting sets of explanatory variables, as well as presence and background points used for model calibrations, are given in Table S5 of the Electronic Supplementary Material.Modeling algorithms considered in the ensembles were maximum entropy (MAXENT), boosted regression trees (BRT; including a stepwise implementation), random forests (RF), generalized linear models (GLM; including stepwise selection of explanatory variables), generalized additive models (GAM; including stepwise selection of explanatory variables), multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), regression trees (RT), artificial neural networks (ANN), flexible discriminant analysis (FDA), support vector machines (SVM), and the BIOCLIM algorithm. The ensemble modeling was carried out using the BiodiversityR package using default settings. The specifics of how different models are implemented are explained in the package help function and Kindt (2018). As spatial autocorrelation among species presence points is known to bias model evaluations based on cross-validation, we evaluated the ability of all individual modeling algorithms to cope with spatial autocorrelation by calculating calibrated Area Under Curve (cAUC) values and comparing these with a geographical null model (Hijmans, 2012). We compared the cAUCs of each of the individual distribution models with the cAUCs of the geographical null model resulting from twenty iterations, by means of Mann-Whitney tests. Only models that gave cAUC values that were significantly higher than the null model were retained for the construction of different model ensembles (Tables S1 and S2). In a next step, we calculated the cAUC values for all possible ensemble combinations of the retained models that included MAXENT, which is generally considered a superior suitability model (Tables S3 and   S4). This resulted in 1,024 possible ensemble combinations for projections to current and future climate conditions and 8,192 possible ensemble combinations for projections to past climate conditions.Each ensemble combination was constructed as the weighted average of its individual composing models, using their respective average cAUC values as weights. The ensemble that yielded the highest cAUC value was considered to generate the most appropriate scenario for projecting to past and future climate conditions, respectively (Table S5).To assess habitat suitability under mid-Holocene and LGM climate conditions, we carried out projections to two and three climate We limited model projections to areas where suitability scores were higher than the maximum training sensitivity plus specificity threshold obtained from model calibration under current climate conditions. To obtain summarizing maps for the LGM and mid-Holocene climate models, we averaged the threshold-limited suitability maps constructed for both individual climate scenarios. Two scenarios were considered for future suitability maps. Optimistic and pessimistic scenario maps were limited to areas which were identified as suitable by at least one, and half of all 31 possible threshold-limited climate projections, respectively. All maps were edited in ArcMap 10.2All twelve microsatellite markers yielded highly variable allele numbers per locus, ranging from 13 to 28 alleles. Overall, different genetic diversity measures (allelic richness, Shannon diversity, and expected heterozygosity) suggest that most of the sampled populations hold comparable levels of diversity (Table 1). The  1). Figure 4 shows the spatial distribution of the genetic diversity parameters against a background of the spe-cies´ current habitat suitability and the historical distribution of SDTF in Colombia.Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) indicated that 10.6% of the total genetic variation resided between populations, compared with 89.4% between individuals within populations. Pairwise F ST values between sampling areas were generally low, with the exception of Patia which yielded a mean F ST value of 0.14, which was twice as high as the population with the second highest mean value (ZAT, F ST = 0.07; Table S6).Analyses carried out in STRUCTURE showed support for two highly differentiated genetic clusters (K = 2): One grouping trees sampled in the Patía river valley (PAT) and another one grouping all individuals from the rest of the country (Figure S1a). However, ΔK computation also showed support for K = 4, identifying 3 different subclusters in the second group (Figure S1a). Repeating the analysis with the exclusion of Patía samples similarly resulted in support for K = 3 (Figure S1b). Most of the sampling sites outside of Patia were composed of individuals assigned to two or three different clusters (Figure S1c; Figure 5). It is important to note here that due to the modest sampling sizes at some sampling sites, signals of potential genetic differentiation have to be interpreted with caution.The modeled distributions of suitable habitat during past climates (Figure 6) suggest that A. saman populations from SDTF in Future climate projections for the period 2040-2069 (Figure 7) suggest that nearly all currently suitable areas of A. saman are likely to remain so according to at least half of the 31 climate models we considered (Figure 7b) and might significantly expand in the near future according to smaller subsets of models (Figure 7a).We assessed the genetic diversity distribution of A. saman populations across Colombian SDTF fragments and how it may have been shaped by past climatic changes and more recent human influences.Our habitat suitability models during the LGM and mid-Holocene are consistent with the DFRH (Mayle et al., 2004;Pennington et al., 2000;Prado & Gibbs, 1993). Joint interpretation of modeling results and the genetic characterization data gives clues about the origin of the four genetic groups we identified in A. saman and suggests that the genetic differentiation of these groups is likely to predate the LGM, in line with similar findings for other SDTF species (Bocanegra-González et al., 2019, 2018;Caetano et al., 2008;Collevatti et al., 2012;Thomas et al., 2017b;Vitorino et al., 2016). Natural seed dispersal of A. saman is carried out by rodents, tapirs, and peccaries (Allen & Allen, 1981;Durr, 2001). However, in prehistoric times now extinct Pleistocene horses may also have been important, a role which today is likely to have been takenover by domesticated horses and cows (Janzen & Martin, 1982).Due to A. saman's popularity as a shade tree in pastures and farm land since the initiation of the European colonization and possibly before, reproductive material has been distributed extensively through human intervention, either as seeds or seedlings, or as seeds in the gut of domestic animals. As cattle breeding in Colombia became significant only in the seventeenth century (Etter, 2015), it is unlikely that the cultivation or human movement  S6).This group also showed the lowest levels of diversity of all sampling areas, in line with similar findings for Ceiba pentandra (Bocanegra-González et al., 2018). This is likely the consequence of long-lasting processes of genetic isolation exacerbated by more recent impact of anthropogenic degradation.The absence of signs of inbreeding in nearly all localities we sampled, despite centuries of vegetation degradation, might be due to the combination of the admixed nature of populations (Figure 5) To promote the good performance and long-term persistence of planted A. saman tree stand, it will be critical to ensure that planting material has a sufficiently broad genetic basis and is adapted to the current and expected future environmental conditions at each planting site (Jalonen, Valette, Boshier, Duminil, & Thomas, 2018;Roshetko et al., 2017). For ensuring genetic diversity in planting stock, source populations should be large (ideally 100-500 reproductively mature individuals), and seeds should be obtained from ","tokenCount":"3387"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"a805a5373880326deb3a3b8289837a82","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/ebd11069-60cd-465b-92d1-f0f0180d3f38/retrieve","id":"1848988894"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"b976dd82-a2d4-467d-b66a-3c8feff7d2f4","pagecount":"10","content":"Para respaldar el mejoramiento genético, la actividad principal del Programa, es necesario realizar estudios especificos; entre los realizados este año, figura un trabajo para comparar la eficiencia en la producción de granos de Phaseolus vulgaris y de otras ocho leguminosas; se obtuvieron resultados preliminares en la definición de modelos de rendimiento para los cuatro hábitos de crecimiento de P. vulgaris, y se calcularon modelos de su fenologia; además, se estudió el comportamiento del frijol bajo condiciones de estrés y sin ellas.Las leguminosas de grano son morfológicamente similares en lo que se refiere a la constitución básica de la planta. que consiste en una unidad nodal con hojas y vainas adheridas. Para evaluar la eficiencia en rendimiento de P. vulgaris y de otras ocho especies de leguminosas en relación con esa característica, se reafu.ó un ensayo comparativo en ClAT-Palmira; antes se había llevado a cabo un experimento similar con cinco leguminosas (ClAT, Informe Anual, 1978).( Se seleccionaron los genotipos adaptados de la ). mayoría de las especies a partir de ensayos previos de rendimiento y se incluyeron materiales de programas nacionales e internacionales. Las condiciones climáticas ' de CIAT-Palmira se consideran moderadas (temperatura de 23.8°C en promedio), de tal manera que ninguna especie estuvo en desventaja; no se incluyó Phaseolus coccineus porque no está adaptado a las temperaturas locales.Los promedios del rendimiento en grano de las especies oscilaron entre 1.2 y 4.5 ton/ ha (Cuadro 1 ). La duración del área foliar (LAD), la biomasa total y los dias hasta la madurez estuvieron alta y positivamente correlacionados con el rendimiento, en tanto que el índice de cosecha tuvo una correlación negativa.Los fríjoles comunes tuvieron un rendimiento intermedio. y al igual que algunas otras especies ( Vigna spp.) estuvieron altamente sincronizados con la madurez de la vaina. El índice de cosecha y el rendimiento/ LAD fueron comparables con los de la soya y más altos que los de las otras especies. La diferencia en la casa de crecimiento del cultivo (CGR) entre soya y fríjol común fue consistente con la diferencia en elindice máximo del área foliar (LAI).En una comparación detallada a través del tiempo entre las tendencias de los parámetros de crecimiento de un cultivar de frijol común (Porrillo Sintético) y uno de soya (ICA-Tunía) se encontró que los patrones de crecimiento para las dos especies son similares (Figura 1). Sin embargo, los fríjoles comunes maduran mucho más pronto y por lo tanto los valores de LAI y CG R son más bajos. En el fr §ol, la tasa máxima de crecimiento del ( grano (GGR) es mucho más alta y la fase de crecimiento { del mismo es proporcionalmente mucho más corta. _.)Aunque la soya comenzó a florecer al mismo tiempo que los frijoles, la fase de posfloración fue mucho más larga; ello se debe a que en el tallo principal se producen nudos adicionales hasta el final del proceso de floración. El proceso de llenado de granos en la soya ocurre a tasas máximas inferiores a las del frijol común y se extiende por un período más largo (Figura 1). La tasadedescensoenel LAI durante la senectud es más lenta en la soya.Aparentemente. los fríjoles comunes ajustan el tamaño potencial de su depósito metabólico, es decir, el número de vainas, a la fuente disponible o sea al área foliar, y luego proceden a llenar la capacidad de los granos (tasa de crecimiento del grano) tan rápidamente como' es posible. Las soyas en cambio continúan con una GGR alta durante el período de senectud, lo que sugiere que el frijol común es más eficiente que la soya en la utilización de Jos productos de la fotosíntesis . .. r Figura J.  En la Figura 2, que representa los rendimientos de semillas en funci ón de la duración del área foliar (LAD) para cada uno de los genotipos ensayados, se ve que Arachis h)pogea (maní) es la única especie de la lista con una morfología diferente. Estos datos son interesantes ya que muestran cómo una variable, LAD, se puede usar para explicar una gran proporción de variaciones en el rendimiento de los 15 genotipos correspondientes a los cuatro géneros y ocho especies estudiados. Puesto que todas estas especies presentan elementos de construccioo similar, se puede concluir que el rendimiento entre las\\ leguminosas de grano se relaciona simplemente con el número de un idades nodales presentes, el cual, a su vez, es principalmente una función del tiempo.  En ex perimentos preliminares se había estudiado la relación entre los factores morfológicos y fisiológicos y la producción de granos. Sobre esta base se seleccionaron, para cada uno de los cuatro hábitos de crecimiento de P. vulgaris, 40 líneas con variaciones en la duración de su fase de crecimiento vegetativo anterior a la floración y en el tiempo de llenado y tamaño de las semillas; esta selección se hizo • para obtener una muestra con la variación que existe en el germoplasma dentro de cada hábito.Cuadro 2. Promedio~ y tluct ua cio nes de los compo nentes morfológicos seleccionados en 40 líneas de cada há bito de crec1miento de Phaseolus ¡•u lgarís. (21!-53) 52( 1.9-5.4) 3.5 (6. 1-17.4 ) 10.6 -2053)   ( 132-1 102)   (0.1 4-0.47)   (62-267) (2-6)(5.5-24. 7) (5.5-9.4 ) (2. 1-10.1) rasa de creci oniento de nud os rasa de crec im ie nto del cult ivo Figura 3. M odelo preliminar y general de rendimiento con pardmetros escogidos de crecimiento para los cuatro hdbitos de crecim iento d e Pbaseolua vul1arh. [J Solo para el hábito de crecimiento l.• El Cuadro 2 presenta los promedios y las variaciones de los componentes del rendimiento que se habían seleccionado para cada hábito de crecimiento. En informes anuales anteriores se han presentado datos similares; pero en el caso presente el estudio se concentra en la variación obtenida dentro de cada hábito de crecimiento y en la información básica con la cual se construirán los modelos. Como componentes básicos del mismo se escogieron el índice del área foliar (LAI), la tasa de crecimiento del cultivo (CG R), los días hasta la floración , y el número de nudos. Todos ellos, a excepción del CGR, aumentaron desde el hábito de crecimiento 1 hasta el IV; los otros componentes no variaron tanto, o mostraron tendencias por valores medios. Las fluctuaciones de cada componente variaron de acuerdo con el hábito de crecimiento.Puesto que el modelo de rendimiento difiere según el hábito de crecimiento de la planta, para cada hábito se diseñó un modelo. según se discute a continuación. Su forma general se ilustra en la Figura 3, y la descripción de los hábitos de crecimiento se encuentra en el Apéndice A de este informe.Hábito de crecimiento l. El número total de semillas, el número de vainas, el número de semillas por vaina, el número de vainas por nudo, lcr tasa de crecimiento del cultivo (CGR) y la tasa de crecimiento del grano (GGR) están correlacionadas con el rendimiento (Cuadro 3).CUadro 3. Coeficientes de correlacióo de los rendimientos en grano con varios componentes del rendimiento, para los cuatro hábitos de crecimiento de Phaseolus vulgaris. Los días hasta la floración están negativamente correlacionados con el rendimiento. La duración de la fase vegetativa anterior a la floración no tiene efecto sobre el número de nudos formados a pesar de que correlaciona (.47**) con la duración del área foliar (LAD). Esta correlaciona negativamente (-.50**) con el número de vainas por nudo. lo cual tiene una estrecha relación con el rendimiento final. El tamaño de las semillas correlaciona negativamente (-57**) con el número de semillas por vaina. Puesto que este último está altamente correlacionado con el rendimiento en este hábito de crecimiento, la selección por un tamaño grande de semilla puede ser además una selección por rendimientos más bajos. De acuerdo con el modelo inicial para el hábito de crecimiento 1, la selección de una planta con muchos nudos, una larga fase de prefloración y un número mayor de semillas por vaina resultaría en una selección por rendimientos más altos. El gran número de nudos es esencial para suministrar a la p tanta sitios para la formación de vainas y de hojas.Hábito de c:redmlento 11. Todos los componentes del rendimiento, excepto el tamaño de la semilla, los días hasta la floración , y la duración del período de llenado de semillas están correlacionados con el rendimiento (Cuadro 3). El tamaño de la semilla en este caso como en el hábito de crecimiento 1, correlaciona negativamente con el número de semillas por vaina (-.55 .. *). Por consiguiente. una selección por tamaño grande de semilla puede dar como resu ltado un menor número de semillas por vaina y puede ser también una S;Ciección por rendimientos más bajos. Este es el único hábito de crecimiento que muestra una correlación entre el máximo LAl y el rendimiento. Esto se debe a la relación directa del LAI con el GGR y el número de semillas por vaina. La correlación (.61***) entre plantas/ m 1 y el número de nudos sugiere que la densidad de plantas para este hábito de crecimiento puede afectar el rendimiento final. El modelo del hábito de crecimiento 11 implica que tanto el LAl como el número de nudos son los factores más limitantes del aumento en la producción de granos.Hábito de crecimiento 111. Entre los factores correlacionados con el rendimiento están el número total de semillas, el número de vainas, el número de semillas por vaina y el máximo LAl (Cuadro 3). El modelo para este hábito tiende a ser menos obvio en la selección de los componentes de rendimiento para aumentar la producción de granos. Aunque el LAI está correlacionado con el rendimiento, no tiene una relación directa con ninguno de los componentes del mismo usados en este caso. El modelo sugiere, sin embargo, que la selección por un número mayor de nudos o por tamaño grande de semillas puede ser además una selección por rendimiento bajo. La carencia de relación entre GGR y el rendimiento final del grano y la correlación negativa (-40 .. ) con las vainas por nudo sugieren que el área foliar está 1 imitando el soporte para la formación de vainas y el llenado de las semillas.Hiblto de credmlento IV. Se diferencia de Jos otros en que el tamaño de la semilla y el número de semillas por vaina están correlacionados con el rendimiento (Cuadro 3). Aún cuando el tamaño de la semilla y el nú~ro de semillas por vaina están negativamente correlacionados entre sí (-57**), la selección por el tamaño grande de la semilla así como por el mayor número de semillas por vaina daría como resultado rendimientos más altos. Hubo una correlación negativa (-.57*) entre GGR y la duración del período de llenado de semillas, lo que sugiere que podria ser benéfico acortar el período que va de la floración a la madurez fisiológica, puesto que GGR está correlacionado con el rendimiento.Obsenaciones generales. En todos los hábitos de crecimiento, excepto en el 1 V, la selección por un tamaño grande de semilla sin suficientes semillas por vaina puede llevar a una selección por rendimientos más bajos. Puesto que los modelos descritos están en las fases iniciales de desarrollo, no se sabe si los límites de tamaño de la semiJla tienen efectos perjudiciales en el número de semillas por vaina. El número de vainas por nudo, y el número total de vainas para todos los hábitos de crecimiento corre-¡ acionaron con el rendimiento excepto en el hábito l.No hubo relación directa entre estos dos parámetros con LAI y LAD, lo que sugiere que hay suficiente área foliar para sustentar el crecimiento de las vainas. En el hábito de crecimiento 1, se necesita aumentar el LAD, ya sea por incremento del LAI máximo o el tiempo hasta la madurez fisiológica. Para el hábito de crecimiento 11 existió una relación (.56***) entre el LA! y el OGR, lo cual sugiere que el área foliar es limitante en el llenado de las semiHas.Nótese que al cambiar uno de estos componentes necesariamente aumentan o disminuyen los efectos del mis111o o de otros componentes sobre la producción de grano. Se desconocen los límites hasta los cuales un componente se puede modificar sin que haga que otros factores se vuelvan limitantes del rendimiento.Con el fin de evaluar la conveniencia de una nueva linea o cultivar para una determinada región, es necesario conocer la supuesta fenología del material. Puesto que 62 esta respuesta fenológica depende de la temperatura y el fotoperíodo, es necesario tener un modelo que pronostique los efectos de estas variables.Tal modelo matemático fue desarrollado por la sección de Fisiología del Programa de Fríjol y la unidad de Estudios Agroecológicos del CIAT. Aunque en este informe no se presentan la derivación y la forma del modelo, se describen los resultados de la prueba del mismo.Los datos para la prueba fueron los resultantes del desarrollo de un conjunto ordinario de 20 cultivares del Vivero Internacional de Rendimiento y Adaptación de Fríjol (!BY AN) de 1976, en 39 localidades internacionales. Previamente se había evaluado la semejanza en la noración de los 20 cultivares, comparando su comportamiento en 27 localidades del mundo con pruebas independientes de su sensibilidad al fotoperiodo en CIAT-Palmira (CIA T, Informe Anual, 1978).En la construcción del modelo actual, la longitud crítica del día se fijó en 13 horas 30 minutos (en CIAT-Palmira se habían probado materiales bajo una longitud de día normal de 12 horas, 20 minutos, y en una longitud del día ampliada a 18 horas). Los coeficientes /3 0 a{3 4 se estimaron ajustando el modelo a los datos de IBYAN 1976. Al comparar estos coeficientes del modelo con las agrupaciones del estudio anterior, las razones de su comportamiento fueron evidentes (Cuadro 4).La clase de la respuesta al fotoperíodo y los conglomerados que presenta el cuadro en las columnas de la derecha se determinaron a partir de los análisis iniciales. El coeficiente de foto periodicidad ({31) se calculó a partir del modelo; está en O o cerca de O cuando hay poca o ninguna demora en la floración cuando la longitud del dia aumenta por encima del punto crítico; es decir, la respuesta al fotoperíodo es esencialmente neutral; el valor se acerca a 1 cuando el material se hace más sensible al fotoperíodo.El coeficiente {3 0 .indica el número de dias a la floración cuando ni los fotoperíodos ni la temperatura son limitantes. Las temperaturas básicas, /32> /3 3 y /3 4 , son también parámetros del modelo, e indican respectivamente el punto donde un cultivar muestra una respuesta inicial a la temperatura, donde ésta tiende a estabilizarse, y donde la temperatura más alta produce un descenso en el comportamiento del cultivar respecto a la floración. En los patrones de conglomerado originales es posible observar que los grupos 1, 2 y 3 formaron un patrón perceptible. Aparte de eso, los tipos de respuesta • fueron numerosos y variados, lo que según el nuevo modelo se debe a una variedad de respuestas a la temperatura.Los tres primeros grupos comprenden un tipo de respuesta a la temperatura llamado aquí \"normal\". Al final de los conglomerados están varios grupos con respuestas variadas al fotoperíodo, pero hay un tipo de respuesta \"amplia.. debida a un amplio espectro de temperaturas estables. Entre estos dos extremos está un grupo de cultivares con respuestas mezcladas.Dadas las posibles fuentes de error por el uso de datos fenológicos procedentes de una cadena internacional grande, la raíz de la media cuadrada del error (RMC) en aproximadamente cuatro días confirma que los datos y el modelo describen bastante bien las interacciones de temperatura y fotoperíodo en el comportamiento del cultivar de fríjol.Los resultados son importantes porque ofrecen la posibilidad de estimar los parámetros del modelo a partir de evaluaciones simples (actualmente de rutina) en las estaciones de C lAT. Esto permitirá predecir la {enología tanto de los cultivares existentes como de las líneas nuevas para el área total de acción del Programa de Frijol. y así ayudar a determinar su adaptabilidad a cualquier sitio.' En un experimento se estudiaron los efectos del salta hojas ( Empuusc•a kraemen) sobre los componentes de rendimiento del fríjol y el rendimiento final en granos. Dos líneas tolerantes (EMP 9 y 00124), dos lineas susceptibles (BAT 41 y Bunsi) y una linea intermedia (ICA-Tui) se cultivaron en parcelas protegidas y sin protección en CIAT-Palmira.El rendimiento y la mayoría de los principales componentes del rendimiento disminuyeron significativamente de los tratamientos protegidos a los no protegidos, sin considerar si las líneas eran tolerantes o susceptibles (Cuadro 5). Se registraron disminuciones significativas de 47% en las líneas tolerantes y de 59% en las lineas susceptibles; las diferencias de rendimiento se debieron a disminuciones en el número de nudos, en el indicedel área foliar (LAl) y en la duración del área foliar (LAD). Unicamente durante las fases finales de crecimiento -de la planta, las ninfas y los adultos del saltahojas mostraron preferencias distintas entre las líneas tolerantes y susceptibles .La Figura 4 compara las curvas de los diferentes parámetros de crecimiento de la planta y de las poblaciones de -insectos; éstas corresponden a recuentos totales por planta. Durante el período de crecimiento la curva de población de ninfas de las líneas tolerantes permaneció alta debido a que el material vegetativo (medido por el LAl y la biomasa total) de las mismas disminuyó menos que el de las lineas susceptibles; la población de ninfas en las líneas tolerantes empezó a disminuir cuando las plantas alcanzaron la madurez fisiológica; a partir de ese momento el LAI y la biomasa total disminuyeron rápidamente como resultado del consumo de material por parte de los insectos.Las poblaciones de adultos aumentaron más bien constantemente tanto en las líneas tolerantes como en las susceptibles. Sólo después de que las últimas fueron dañadas severamente. los insectos emigraron hacia el crecimiento verde de las lí ~as tolerantes, mostrando un aumento significativo en el número de adultos casi al final del periodo.Cuadro 5. Rendimiento y parámetros de crecimiento seleccionados de tlneas con diferente grado de tolerancaa a Empoasca kraemeri bajo condiciones de protección y sin ellas. La repentina pisminución en la producción total de biomasa y en la tasa de crecimiento del cultivo (CGR) de las lineas susceptibles coincidió con las mayores poblaciones de ninfas. El LAI del tallo, pero no de las a) e . .. También se estudiaron los parámetros del rendimiento en fnjol a niveles altos y bajos de insumas. Los insumas altos incluyeron un completo control de insectos y enfermedades y aplicaciones de fertilizante al momento de la siembra; los niveles bajos implicaron únicamente la aplicación de una pequeña cantidad de fertilizante al momento de la siembra (Cuadro 6).Las diferencias de rendimientos tanto de los tallos como de )as ramas fueron significativas entre los dos tratamientos. Un hecho interesante fue que las semillas resultaron más grandes en los tratamientos de bajos insumas. aunque no de manera significativa; esto se debió probablemente a la disminución significativa del número de semillas por vaina. En las discusiones precedentes sobre la construcción de modelos de rendimiento se demostró que estos dos parámetros están negativamente correlacionados.Los datos de este experimento sugieren que una de las mayores causas de la reducción del rendimiento en condiciones de bajos insumas es el bajo número de semillas por vai na, y que la mayor parte de las pérdidas en rendimiento se puede atribuir al bajo rendimiento en las ramas.Cuadro 6. Relaciones entre los componentes escogidos del rendimiento y el rendimiento en lineas de Pha3eo/us vulgaru que rectben dos ntveles de_ insumos.Componentes del Nivel de msumos 1 O.M.S. ' l.os 1 n:r.umo' alto\\ con'1'h:n en aplu.:ac 1unes regulares conua tnsectos y enfermedades asl como fertilizante~ al momento de la stembra l O\\ m~umth baJo:. con\"\"l)ten en una sola aphcac•ón de una baja cantidad de lert1li1.ante al momento de la s1embra l os 'atores de 1nsumo' alto> con a>temco fueron significattva mente d 1lcrcntes de los valore' comparables de bato' insumos.","tokenCount":"3304"}

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"be8e03e1a5ed82c3b72ca4c99a3def57","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/5cbb6afe-b5f3-44fa-b79a-627184ceeb33/retrieve","id":"1348539704"},"keywords":["Evaluation","indicators","monitoring","monitoring committee","participatory","reflection","tools Evaluation","indicateurs","suivie","comite de suivie","participation","réflexion","instruments"],"sieverID":"b7bebd23-fa5f-4c47-9841-6173807a37c8","pagecount":"7","content":"The Community Based Participatory Monitoring and Evaluation (CB-PME) tool empowers poor local farming communities to improve their livelihoods. While this process is people centred, it draws on local people's capacities, while giving the end users of a technology a voice. The experience of the Katamata farmers' group in Tororo district using PM&E is given in this paper. This group have embarked on a commercial groundnut production enterprise to improve their livelihoods. They decided to monitor one and three year-prioritized objectives for this enterprise. The three year objectives were based on the improvement of the farmers' livelihoods and included having food security, with a marketed surplus, creating an awareness of HIV/AIDS, and individual commercial production, while the one year objectives dealt with the improvement in agricultural production. Some short term objectives have been achieved. The farmers have selected the best variety for commercial groundnut production. They have since reflected on these objectives and indicators with the monitoring and evaluation committee from their group whose main function is to collect , synthesize, store and report information to the group, community and visitors. This participatory process has empowered farmers to make production and marketing decisions on their enterprises and social lives with the ultimate goal of improving their livelihoods.Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) is necessary for any developmental project and activities. It provides feedback to ensure that activities are managed adaptively. Conventional approaches to monitoring and evaluation entail being conducted by external experts, with predetermined indicators of success, for accountability purposes. The participatory approach to monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) involves the participation of the local stakeholders in the design, collection, analysis and utilisation of M&E information such as indicators to measure change (Cramb and Purcell, 2001). Tracking changes in these indicators enables the direct beneficiaries to make decisions on how to adjust their activities. For this reason, community based PM&E has often been appreciated as a tool that 'empowers' local communities to initiate, control and take corrective action, is 'costeffective', 'more accurate', 'more relevant', etc (Guijt et al., 1998). From the project implementation perspective, other benefits of PM&E include internal learning, understanding and working better with communities to improve their livelihood.Ultimately, PM&E can be used for involving local people in assessing progress, impacts, and achievements of the project, project management and planning, institutional learning through continued self reflection and improved decision-making capacity, understanding and negotiating stakeholders perspectives by adapting objectives, indicators and tools to make them more accessible and relevant to local people and finally for public accountability through the enhancement of information flow and the provision of feedback at different levels (within groups, community, project managers, between farmers and R&D systems).PM&E is a methodological frontier; hence different projects and organizations have used different methodologies. In an effort for farmers and scientists to work together to effectively develop forage technologies, (Cramb and Purcell, 2001), established the baseline situation, decided what were the 'issues' requiring monitoring and evaluation, selected key indicators, tested methods for obtaining information, analyzing and presenting information, and assessed the usefulness of the information for decisions.The PM&E methodology used in this study is part of a wider program called the Enabling Rural Innovation (ERI) used by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT). ERI aims to strengthen social organization and entrepreneurial skills in rural communities, encouraging farmers to produce what they can market rather than market what they produce. This approach used four key approaches (Kaaria, 2005) the resource to consumption framework, which links resources to production and consumption; balancing market risk and food security, and the use of participatory approaches for research and development. This approach is currently being used in western, eastern, central Uganda and being scaled out to northern Uganda. It is also being used in east, central and southern Africa.This study outlines the methodology used to determine the indicators for the success of the farmers' sustainable livelihoods, through PM&E of their groundnut enterprise and reviews the preliminary results of PM&E data.The study was conducted in Tororo district located in eastern Uganda. 82% of the land in this district is under agriculture, the main economic activity. Poor natural resource endowment has resulted into productivity declines, recurrent food shortages and famines. Tororo is the district with the highest proportion of its population being characterized as 'poorest' (36%), compared to Kabarole, Masaka, Pallisa, and Rakai districts (Appleton, 2001;Ravnborg, 2004).Stakeholders were identified to start this process (Fig. 1). Africa 2000 Network (A2N), a community based development organization working with 100 groups in 5 districts in eastern Uganda was identified as an implementing partner. A2N promotes farmer institutional development and gender equity, collaborates with local NGO's to provide advisory services on sustainable agriculture and facilitates networking and information exchange among agriculture stakeholders in the district. A joint (CIAT & A2N) field visit was made to four farmer groups where discussions guided by a checklist were held to select the farmer group.The Katamata (meaning 'let us try') group was selected. The group is comprises 21 members (10 females and 11 males) and was formed in 1997. It is located in  The farmers conducted a number of activities (Table 1) before they began the enterprise development phase.The group members were shown a comparison graphic (Germann et al., ) and asked to interpret it, leading to a discussion and interpretation of monitoring in Luganda, Kiswahili, Japadhola and Ateso. The farmers were separated into two groups were then asked to draw two graphics showing a comparison of monitoring and the absence monitoring as applied to their enterprises. The farmers were guided to focus on the groundnut enterprise, and brainstormed on their future achievements for this enterprise. They categorized and prioritized short term (1 year), and long term (3 years) objectives. The group was desegregated by gender to generate differences in results and to reduce group sizes in order to encourage participation by all members. The list of indicators defined by the farmers was prioritized to 2 indicators for each objective. These indicators were desegregated by gender to extract any differences in the indicators. To facilitate the extraction of indicators, the current situation for each of these indicators was also listed before prioritization.The monitoring group was selected by the Katamata group members by selecting four female members to add to the experimental committee. The Ateso interpretation \"Aruanar\" meaning follow up was selected to name the monitoring group. Within the Aruanari group, 5 teams were paired based on gender, literacy, and distance between homesteads, level of co-operation. The functions of the Aruanari group were to collect monitoring and evaluation information and data, keep records of the group activities in the record books, report to the group and visitors about information and data collected, store information of the Aruanari group. The tools for data collection were developed by the farmers and were guided by the indicators. Each team determined the frequency of data collection for each objective, and decided on how to collect this data.The short term group objectives and indicators. All the prioritized one year indicators were production oriented (Table 2). Farmers were interested in selecting the best groundnut and bean varieties and soil fertility treatments in preparation for the enterprise development phase.They would also multiply seed for individual group members' seed security. To facilitate learning and service provision, partnerships and exposure visits were required. Differences in preference by gender were shown in the prioritized one year objectives, the male farmers considered exposure visits to be the most important objective, while the female farmers thought that owning a spray pump was the most important objective.The farmers had identified the best varieties and soil fertility treatments. Serenut 4 (a pink, small seeded variety) was found to be the highest yielding ground nut variety with up to between 300-350kg from between 0.25 -0.5 acres. In the soil fertility experiment, Kankwatsa et al., (2004) reported that there was no significant difference in yield of groundnuts for the different soil fertility treatments during the two seasons (2003B and 2004A).The farmers The group completed two seasons of bean and groundnut experimentation to determine the best soil fertility treatment and improved groundnut and bean varieties suited to the local management and production conditions.NABE 2 and NABE 12C were well suited for the short rains and long rains respectively. Farmers however did not grow beans during the enterprise development phase because the crops were damaged by excessive hot dry spells and hailstones in 2 consecutive seasons. This sequence of events led to the discontinuation of commercial bean production. Serenut 4 had the highest yields. For the soil fertility management treatments (groundnuts), compost manure had the highest yields. The best technology combination for the better yield was compost + not sprayed + Red beauty (Kankwatsa et al., 2004).identified the best soil fertility treatment to be the control in the 2004A season. The control also produced net benefits of around 300,000 Uganda Shillings in the costs benefit analysis. The spray pump has not been purchased however; the farmers have been using one that was easy accessed from a neighbouring farmer. The farmers planted groundnuts between April and May 2005 and 10 individuals sprayed the crop two weeks with Dudu-fenos 440. Timely spraying of the crop was achieved in this case.No visit had been made to any market outside Tororo and Uganda for market information; however, exposure visits were made by 4 individuals to three markets within Tororo in the 2004/5 season. Serenut 3 had the highest price at the Tamata one stop centre, while Kabonge, Red beauty and Serenut 2 ranged in price between 1000 and 1500 shillings/kg. The Katamata group become a member of the One Stop Centre, where members had a higher bargaining power.Six predominantly local partners regularly visit the group to provide agriculture and social services. These networks and associations provide an enabling environment for the scale out of technologies and the free flow of information to the group from institutions providing this support. Katamata has also conducted at least 3 field days (one of which the group paid a journalist from Rock Mambo Radio a local FM station to cover the event.) to share experiences on the group activities. The group would need two more partners to meet the target set for their first indicator. A2N provided a loan of 1,744,000 Uganda Shillings in March of 2005, which was used for production purposes.The long term objectives ad indicators. The primary long term objective was food security throughout the year. Seed security, group cohesion, and social issues like gender and HIV/AIDS were prioritized objective in the long term. The baseline situation for the food security issue (collected The baseline situation showed a ratio of 3:1 women and men respectively had gone for voluntary testing counselling (VCT) and training. The group membership has dropped as a result of incapability to participate in group activities due to sickness. However, Plan International and TASO have actively involved the women group members of the group in activities of the post test club where tested members are facilitated to sensitize other village members and communities about HIV/AIDS. Although this information was confidential (and could not be presented in this paper), the members provided information freely about their HIV/AIDS status. An increase in VCT from the baseline had been registered where 7 male members had been tested in 2004. The number of times tested ranged from 0 to 4 times. Farmers were individually growing groundnuts for commercial purposes (Fig. 2). The PMR established that there was a high market demand for large red groundnuts. Hence the farmers embarked on experimentation to determine which of the red varieties was best suited to their local management and production conditions. Despite Serenut 4 (Pink seed) being the highest yielding variety, the farmers planted a range of pink and red seeds such as Kabonge (over 250 kg), Serenut 2, Serenut 3, and Serenut 4, hence spreading their risks.Men make decisions on the education of the children, sale of the produce in the home, management of conflicts, and the distribution of household chores and own livestock, bicycles, and trees. One household reported that men in the home also own money earned from the sale of produce. Women are decision makers on the food consumption, and own household property and food. One of the households was female headed where she was responsible for all the chores, decisions in the home. The Plan for Modernization of Agriculture notes that in Uganda, women lag behind men in terms of education and income earnings, that women have limited economic opportunities due to their societal roles and responsibilities, that intra-household benefit sharing from the sale of produce often does not favor women.In a study by Ravnborg et al., 2004, Tororo district stood out as having the largest proportion (39%) of households characterized by inequitable gender relations, characterized by the equality of relations between husband and wife. The same study noted that whereas particularly in Tororo and Kabarole, but also in Pallisa, gender relations are much more likely to be inequitable in the poorest households than in the less poor and better-off households, and thus further aggravating the situation of women in the poorest households because of the payment of bride price and the high levels of polygamy characteristic of eastern Uganda.No information was collected on the group strengthening objective partly because the farmers have not yet enforced the payment of the membership fee and the group has not had any new member.Success and challenges of PM&E. The PMA emphasizes the consultation and participation of poor farmers in order to design, implement and monitor the most appropriate and feasible public sector interventions. This also applies to the private sector as well. Poverty is defined by poor people as more than just the lack of incomes; it is also the lack of the means to satisfy basic, social needs, as well as a feeling of powerlessness to break out of the cycle of poverty and insecurity of person and property. The farmers' prioritized long term goals as being food secure, engaging in income generation, and improvement in the social related factors, all critical to the satisfaction of the basic needs of these farmers while simultaneously increasing farmers' incomes through agricultural production.This exercise was conducted in June 2004 with the Katamata group and visited 9 months later to evaluate progress. The information had not been recorded in the farmers PM&E books, however, this information was still fresh in the farmers minds or recorded else where. This showed that the farmers were in fact capable of keeping track.PM&E has been documented to be more timeconsuming and expensive than traditional monitoring and evaluation approaches. In this case, some of the information was not collected because the team members were not able to go to each of the individual member's home to collect this information due to resource restriction; furthermore some information was cumbersome and bulky to collect. Information was collected from some members Quantity grown in kg and not others. Some members of the Aruanari group took the opportunity to collect this information while the farmers group had meeting to ease their work. All the above irregularities could be ironed out with regular reflection with group members. While the learning and change and managing data aspects have been inadequately covered in this paper, valuable lessons have been learnt from managing data collection.The one year objectives could easily be achieved because they were more concrete and tangible. One short term indicator had already been achieved. The three year indicators would need to be collected and analyzed over time to see the results.While most of the critical information was gathered to improve agricultural production and farmers livelihoods, the major challenge is to analyze it with the farmer group so that it is easily understood by the farmers. Some of the information gathered was quite sensitive information and could not be presented in this paper; it is of benefit to the group however it cannot be presented elsewhere.The improvement in agricultural production achieved from the one year objectives would lead to the improvement in the farmers' livelihoods as indicated by the farmers' 3 year objectives as agreed by the farmers. Farmers are capable of monitoring and evaluating their own projects if their capacities have been adequately built. The major challenge is the time factor in the systematization of this information. The Aruanari group has been able to reflect on the information that has been collected only once. This reflection availed the members with the opportunity to evaluate whether they are achieving their objectives.PM&E can be time consuming, difficult to systematize and generates huge quantities of data, therefore can be done at group level in order to be scaled out to other groups, group networks and communities to ensure community based PM&E in this case.","tokenCount":"2775"}

data/part_5/0727802891.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"c8513110f4aeaba09e49318668993185","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/7bf7b79b-754f-4c03-8f8b-fc5c020fbf17/retrieve","id":"-1372646834"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"7621da5b-93f3-46ce-9e6b-432ac5f2393b","pagecount":"4","content":" Gender and climate change issues are generally treated as cross-cutting issues, not given priority or a clear allocated budget in many of the reviewed policies. Gender mainstreaming in most of the reviewed policies is an addendum rather than an integral aspect of the respective policies. While the mainstreaming of gender in all climate change activities and programs can certainly prove beneficial, this should be done with both a comprehensive implementation plan across sectors and a clear budget allocation. The way in which gender issues are approached in agriculture-related policies and strategies in Uganda is diverse and not homogenized. There is need for stronger cross-sectoral coordination and accountability since gender mandates for respective interventions fall under different ministries and agencies. Climate change related policies have been mostly designed to address practical gender needs thus do not address the structural constraints that hinder women´s access to resources. If policies are to tackle the root cause of gender inequalities, greater attention should be paid to gender structural constraints.Years of research have shown that achieving long-term gender-sensitive climate change adaptation at the local and national level requires a supportive climate policy framework (Terry, 2009;Johnsson-Latham, 2010). However, intertwined with the multiple climate change related regulatory frameworks and actions is the recognition and examination of the differentiated needs, constraints and preferences that men, women and different socio-economic and cultural groups have in a changing climate (Dankelman and Jansen, 2010). It seems clear that in order to understand how people´s livelihoods, cultural values, local knowledge, etc. interact with a changing climate and environment at different times in history, a close look at the gender-specificities becomes fundamental. This gendered understanding of agriculture and natural resource management will be central for an effective design of policy and development programs, ensuring that they are appropriate and beneficial in the local context.In order to obtain an enriched understanding of the framing of gender issues in climate change related policies in Uganda and to explore its impacts on climate change adaptation at grassroots, the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) analyzed the influence of current policy and institutional frameworks on gender and climate issues. The study evaluated the institutional and political context under which policies related to climate change are developed and implemented in Uganda as well as examined the gender approaches employed at different administrative levels of the government.Findings are based on a desk review of seven agricultural policies and five national plans (Table 1). The analysis paid special attention to the degree of gender inclusion in decision-making processes, the extent to which policies address women´s access to and ownership of resources and the extent to which women are empowered. Additionally, ten focus groups discussions (FGD) with farmers (men and women separately) in Rakai and Nwoya districts and twenty-five semi-structured expert interviews were conducted with policy formulators at the national level, international donors, NGO representatives, district and sub-county officials, parish chiefs and local council I leaders. Even as Uganda progressively engages more earnestly with gender and climate change issues at the policy level, challenges still remain in formulation, regulatory framework and implementation at district and lower governance levels. This research identified four main shortfalls with regard to gender considerations in the formulation and implementation of climate change related policies in Uganda:The review revealed that in both the East African Community Climate Change Policy (EACCCP) and the National Climate Change Policy of Uganda, the terms gender and women are interchangeably used. Additionally, consideration of men´s capacity to adapt and vulnerability to climate change and a comparison with that of the women is widely overlooked. This unclear gender terminology is coupled with the portrayal of women as a group vulnerable to climate change. For example, taking the National Climate Change Policy of Uganda as an example, it is remarkable how in six out of the eight sections where the word \"women\" appears, it does so in association with the word \"vulnerability\". This representation of the problem, \"women are more vulnerable to climate change\" not only creates a simplified vision of the gendered vulnerability to climate change but also brings with it specific discoursive effects.By perceiving women as a homogenous group in respect to the negative effects of a changing climate, the climate change policy of Uganda neglects and radically simplifies the broad spectrum of women and men that exist in society and who will present different degrees of vulnerability to climate change depending on a wide range of socio-economic and cultural factors. With this narrow approach to gender vulnerability, targeted climate change interventions that take into consideration these differences will likely not be developed and instead simplistic, short-term gendered interventions will be designed. If not causing unintended consequences, the best-case scenario of these simplistic interventions will be that they will not reach their greatest possible potential. Throughout both the EACCCP and the national Climate Change Policy of Uganda, women are also identified as key agents of change and are assumed to have a key role in tackling the effects of climate change. This discourse of women as \"saviors\" greatly resonates with previous Women, Environment and Development (WED) discourses where women were portrayed as being closer to nature and environmentally conscious (Arora-Jonson, 2011). This particular portrayal of women served in the past as a justification for a greater inclusion in women in processes of participatory management of natural resources. However, there is extensive evidence that the inclusion of women in participatory processes and programs can turn out to be underproductive if women´s interests, pre-existing inequalities and the specifics of the local context are not taken into account (Leach, 2009;O'Relly 2006). In fact, the inclusion of women in participatory processes might translate into more work for women without any practical benefit for them. Interviews with key informants showed limited enforcement of gender considerations at district level in both Rakai and Nwoya. Even though gender is used as an indicator for the performance reviews of policy officers, it is only in the limited sense of the \"number of women invited to programs and activities\". Additionally, interviews revealed limited knowledge and skills on gender, with most of the policy officers consulted having received little or no gender-related training.A similar effect occurs in the mainstreaming of climate change issues in different sectorial policies. Both the EACCP and the Ugandan National Climate Change Policy acknowledge the multi-sectoral aspects of climate change and advocate for mainstreaming of climate change issues in sectoral, national and local policies, strategic plans and budgets. However, climate change seems to be everywhere and nowhere, since even when climate change issues are mainstreamed in the policy, there are no clear guidelines on how to implement the mandates, and additionally, the research found that in most cases there is no budget allocated for it. When it comes to mainstreaming both climate change and gender in the different sector policies, the challenges with effective implementation become exponential.Additionally, when comparing the approach taken to tackle gender issues in the selected climate change related policies and strategies, several disconnections were found between them. For example, most of the National Development Plan action points on gender equalitythe majority of which are being tasked to the Ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development (MGLSD)are not articulated in the National Gender Policy. Similarly, the Agricultural Sector Development and Investment Plan fails to articulate how the strategy engages with the MGLSD in achieving the mandate of enhancing agricultural outputs. These disconnections exemplify the lack of harmonization and coordination on approaches used by sectors in the issue of gender, which consequently implies the lack of an implementation plan to comprehensively engage in gender related issues.The majority of the reviewed policies and plans fail to comprehensively address gendered power dynamics that exist at different levels (i.e. intra-household, community, sub-county, district) and the structural constraints that underpin women's vulnerability to climate change (e.g. poor decision-making power, low literacy rates, heavy labour burden, their weak ownership and control over resources). Furthermore, customary laws and traditions play a predominant role in the governance dynamics of the rural communities in both Rakai and Nwoya Districts, relegating formal policies and by-laws to the background.A clear example is constituted by land tenure systems established in Uganda. Even though the country has a thorough land policy ( 2013) by which women and men are granted equal rights to own (and co-own) land, numbers show that as much as 61.3 % of women do not possess ownership of land (Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2011) and are only given access to it through their male counterparts and other male family members. Indeed, most of the land in Uganda is effectively maintained under customary arrangements which restrict land ownership by women, ranging from social and cultural constraints to outright prohibitions. The fact that women do not have effective ownership of land implies that they might not be willing to make long-term investment in land that they do not own. Even if they were, they might be denied access to financial services since they lack official land titles as collateral. Worse still, even when women have been granted access to the land through their marriage, they are at risk of losing this should they divorce or become widows. Ineffective decentralization as a key barrier to \"walk the talk\" for gender sensitive policies in UgandaEven as Uganda operates with a decentralized structure, the system presents important drawbacks with regard to budget formulation and allocation to districts. Receiving priorities set at National Level with limited consultation in the districts, policy officers are left with very little room to maneuver and allocate funds to the priorities in their districts. Additionally, insufficient budget, training and staffing were consistently mentioned as the main reasons for ineffective implementation of gender and climate change policies. Apart from the quota system first established in Uganda by the 1995 constitution (by which a third of all representatives and activities needs to be pursued by women), policy officers report to have introduced little or no changes in their activities with regard to gender. However, even as more women are being represented in district programs and meetings, key informants from interviews and FGDs point out that they tend to remain quieter and less participative than men, due to embedded cultural norms and assumptions. It is clear that climate change related policies in Uganda have with the years become more comprehensive and gender sensitive. It is however also evident that the main challenge remains at the level of policy implementation and coordination between ministries. Customary laws and traditions greatly influence the governance systems of rural communities in Rakai and Nwoya, which relegate formal policies and bylaws to the background. This is especially visible in land ownership where despite the land policy stipulating equal ownership, women typically only access land through male relatives. The policies reviewed do not address the structural constraints that hinder women´s access to resources.There is need for a more rigorous understanding of the social and bio-cultural local relationships in environmental and agricultural policy design and implementation. ","tokenCount":"1829"}

data/part_5/0739498651.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"d5e070acfa492412b8371c038b840d00","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/04478f29-b3e1-4f7a-b910-b84c61431b9c/retrieve","id":"1415429952"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"82c6042b-6b33-4c8e-bc6e-1e1257893acb","pagecount":"16","content":"KALRO and PABRA in conjunction with several stakeholders have successfully promoted the Nyota bean for improved nutrition, increased productivity and a variety farmers can rely to improve on family incomes. However, due to Nyota characteristics of better taste, higher levels of iron and zinc and quick cooking, there were issues in its utilization for food with the farming community. The farmers could not utilize the Nyota bean the way they cook other bean varieties they have. Due to these special attributes in this variety, farmers together with extension staffs requested for information on its utilization and this led to the generation of this recipe manual. • Mix all the flour, salt and add a little water as you knead the dough.• Divide the dough and make into equal balls.• Cover the balls and let relax for 30 minutes.• Roll each ball at a time on a floured board.• Fry on a shallow pan while applying oil on the upper side.• Turnover and cook the other side till done. • Mix the flour and salt and add a little water as you knead the dough.• Divide the dough and make into equal balls.• Cover the balls and let relax for 30 minutes.• Roll each ball at a time on a floured board.• Fry on a shallow pan while applying oil on the upper side.• Turnover and cook the other side till done. • Put the water in a pan and put on the fire and let it warm • Mix all the flours together.• Draw out 1½ cups of warm water, add to the flour and mix into a smooth paste • Let the water in the pan boil.• Add the mixed paste to the boiling water while stirring until the mixture starts boiling.• Let it boil for 30 minutes, add lemon juice, and serve hot or cold. • Mix the maize and bean grain.• Wash the grain.• Put the grain in a pot of water and put on the fire and let it boil until tender.• Drain the water.• Put oil and onions to cook.• Add tomatoes to cook.• Add the cooked githeri.• Mix the 100% bean flour with some water, stir until mixed.• Add to the githeri and cook for 5 minutes.Githeri With 100% Bean Flour • Mix the maize and bean grain.• Wash the grain.• Put the grain in a pot of water and put it on the fire and let it boil until tender.• Drain the water.• Put oil and onions to cook.• Add tomatoes to cook • Add the cooked githeri and cook for five minutes.Normal Githeri (minus bean flour)","tokenCount":"434"}

data/part_5/0757491217.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"6c2b4f4048a4393153ac304c0ed6b135","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/7278be67-4d05-455a-a851-f5636ec05a87/retrieve","id":"1084764839"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"862a61b2-9895-4142-8dca-e858a3a01809","pagecount":"10","content":"The Health and antibiotics in Vietnamese pig production project, known as VIDA-PIG, is a collaboration between the University of Copenhagen, the National Institute of Nutrition and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). VIDA-PIG will assess veterinary drug use in Vietnamese pig farms. The project will carry out research to identify and evaluate factors affecting veterinary health and veterinary drug use with the aim of establishing antimicrobial usage practices that are based on a One Health approach across the smallholder sector.VIDA-PIG project will use mobile based data collection which is more efficient and cheaper than paper based data collection for large data collection exercises. The project will use the Open Data Kit (ODK) suite of tools to collect VIDA-PIG project data.ODK is a free and open source set of tools which help organizations author, field and manage mobile data collection solutions. ODK provides an out-of-box solution for users to; build, collect and aggregate (opendatakit.org).Once you've collected data in the field with ODK Collect, you can upload and manage your data using ODK Aggregate. Aggregate is the intermediary server storage platform that accepts the data and can send it on external applications, if desired. ODK Aggregate also allows you to download datasets in aggregated formats such as CSV files (Managing your Data with ODK Aggregate).A one-day hands on training was organized for VIDA-PIG project enumerators. The objective of the training was to build the capacity of the enumerators to be able to use ODK Collect app on Android tablets to conduct interviews.The training was facilitated via Skype on 15 August 2018 by Louis Okello (ILRI Consultant) based in Kampala, Uganda, East Africa. The training was conducted in English and interpreted by a local ILRI staff into Vietnamese.The training was attended by 10 (8 female, 2 male) participants from ILRI Vietnam, National Institute of Nutrition, Vietnam National University of Agriculture, the National Institute of Nutrition and Institute of Anthropology. More than half of the participants 55% (n=6) had no prior training in using mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) for field based data collection, while the same number of participants had never used mobile devices for field based data collection.Prior to the training 99% (n=10) of the participants said data collection using mobile devices was cheaper and faster than paper based data collection, while all participants said data collection using mobile devices was cheaper and faster than paper based data collection after the training.Participant reported self-confidence did not improve after the training (Figure 1). This may be attributed to the fact that after introducing participants to the theory of mobile based data collection, it was not followed up with sufficient practice that would have enabled enumerators to become familiar with the data collection app.There was improvement in participant knowledge of the ODK app. Participant reporting low knowledge of ODK app fell by 55% after the training, while participants reported a 46% improvement in moderate level of knowledge of the ODK app (Figure 2). Conversely participants correctly answered 75% of the single choice knowledge questions about the ODK app. Most of the participants 99% (n=10) reported being satisfied with the training method used.Participants appreciated the hands on approach of the training, \"I used ODK in the tablet, it is very interesting\", being able to participate by asking questions \"I can ask my question\", and the simplistic approach of the training \"They used a simple way to teaching\", \"I can use tablet easier than before\".1. Inadequate time for enumerators to practice using ODK app. A one-day training was not enough to introduce theory of ODK app, review VIDA questionnaire, and practice using the VIDA questionnaire on ODK app. 2. Lack of a finalized/pre-tested study tool/questionnaire. By the time of the training, the questionnaire had not yet been finalized \"because of the status of questionnaire is not compatible to app, so it takes more time\". Subsequently a considerable amount of time was spent during the training to discuss the VIDA pig project questionnaire. \"We take too long time to review the questionnaire\" ","tokenCount":"666"}

data/part_5/0758346799.json

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+{"metadata":{"gardian_id":"8ca5c84921e37be30eeb9a66b3e4cf57","source":"gardian_index","url":"https://cgspace.cgiar.org/rest/bitstreams/c95ebb07-0c9e-49d5-ad9e-be531a97322f/retrieve","id":"1048134632"},"keywords":[],"sieverID":"a012960f-3e45-48a9-9dfe-f654131a6c77","pagecount":"36","content":"Note: Results are in percent deviations from the respective baseline (no improved feeding) On average, the supplementation strategies increased milk production by 36%, and increased total manure and methane production by 6% and 4%, respectively  However, methane production per kg of milk was reduced by 20%  The largest improvements were in the districts that have the poorest diet quality (Garissa, Gem, Mbeere South, and Siaya)  Producers could also engage in destocking to reduce overall methane emissions Notes: incremental revenues compared to a baseline scenario with no management practices, assumes a carbon price of USD per tCO2e, price per kg of maize is 0.375 USD, includes livestock costs (for feed replacement and manure), 75% of residues left on the field Source: IFPRI-KARI survey 2010","tokenCount":"126"}